Camping

Hitting the Road

Tomorrow morning I am leaving the farm and hitting the road for a 10 day camping trip around Namibia. I'm not planning on taking my laptop and modem so I probably won't be updating my blog again until I get back to San Francisco on November 18.

Savaged by the cheetah

I do enjoy the occasional sensationalist headline. Okay, so it wasn’t me who was savaged by the cheetah. And when I say “savaged”, I mean he was scratched enough to bleed. And when I say “bleed” I don’t mean pouring blood, more like a bit of oozing blood. But it was the cheetah that caused the bleeding scratches, so technically . . . . . . .

I was walking to school yesterday when I saw the office manager followed by one of the guests heading towards to laundry room where they keep the first-

aide kit. I noticed that the guest’s clothes were torn, so I stopped to find out what the problem was. The guest had bleeding scratches all over his legs and arms. He said he had been taking the cheetah for a walk when it had attacked him. He seemed to be in a jolly mood about it “look, I got attacked by a cheetah, isn’t that cool”. From a health and safety standpoint I was a little bit more concerned. I had finally taken the cheetah for a walk the day before (see photos below) and the big cat had gnawed a bit at my lower leg but didn’t put enough oomph into it to break the skin. I must say it was a bit of a troubling experience to have a cheetah gnawing at my leg, but in my case she seemed to be just playing around. Although, it would have been a great badge of courage to have a cheetah scar. Nothing disfiguring, just something I could whip out at dinner parties to make myself sound interesting. Alas, no luck. I asked Stoffle (who takes the cheetah walking every morning and evening) what had happened. Had the guest done something stupid like trying to hug the cheetah? His answer was “no, the cheetah just went after him. Maybe she didn’t like him.” Of course the cheetah attack was a hot topic of conversation over dinner. The cheetah seems to have just lunged at him again and again. He had defensive wounds all over his arms including one nasty puncture wound in his forearm from the cheetah’s dewclaw. While the cheetah had his jaws clasped around the guest’s forearm, the guest had the presence of mind (strangely) to grab his camera in his other hand, hold it at arms length and snap a really cool photo of the cheetah’s mouth attached to his arm. One of the other guests on the campsite had seen the attack happen. She hadn’t realized it was a “tame, pet cheetah” and had seen the big cat run at the unsuspecting man. She had yelled “watch out behind you” and become hysterical as she watched the attack unfold. Apparently it had been quite a scene. All the guests sign a disclaimer when they check into the guest house saying that they recognize there are dangerous animals on the farm and they take full responsibility for their own safely. The three-legged cheetah’s name is Circa and she was hand raised from a cub and probably isn’t full sized yet. Someone needs to decide when this animal is finally getting too big and dangerous to be unrestrained around the guests! I only have two more days left at the farm. I guess it’s not going to be my problem.

Bartending African Style

Patting the three-legged cheetah

Tales from a Namibian Classroom

Denzel’s first words of English seem to be “No chickens in class.

” Every day, at some point, and maybe as many as 10 times a day, chickens seem to think the classroom is a good place to get out of the sun. Whenever we see a chicken in the threshold, the tradition is to turn around, wave our arms wildly and yell “no chickens in class!” Denzel has taken to jumping up and chasing them away with arms flailing and a big grin on his face squeaking “no chickens in class! No chickens!!!!” At least I’ve taught him something. If nothing else, he’ll make a fine security guard when he grows up. All last week the class kept breaking out into a chorus of “Happy birthday three you”. It sounded so hilarious I didn’t have the heart to correct them. Eventually I found out it was Vivian’s 4th birthday. Yesterday Vivian turned up to class an hour late looking like she had been on a three day birthday bender. She was looking groggy and disoriented. She was wearing a ski jacket and boots which was very odd considering it was 100 degrees F outside. Her face was covered in dirt and her very crusty clothes hadn’t been changed for at least three days. In her little fist she was clutching a high caliber bullet – the type that is used to bring down big game. If she had been 15 years older, my suspicions would have been “I just woke up after three days of drinking and drugs and found my lover shot dead next to me.” However, considering she is 4 years old and her mother just had a new baby last week, I’m guessing her mother is a little overwhelmed right now and poor Vivian isn’t getting much sleep either with the new baby crying. Goodness only knows where she got the bullet, but she didn’t fuss when I insisted she hand it over to me. I put it up on a high shelf where the kiddies can’t get to it. The classroom is about 100 feet from the leopard enclosure. Sometimes we can see Rex the leopard up in his tree from our windows. He just hangs there in the branches looking like a big stuffed animal. Of course he is enclosed with an electric fence, so maybe that’s why he doesn’t look too frightening. Leopards are dangerous predators. So I wasn’t too surprised when the children jumped up last week, went to the windows and yelled “Leopard”. I went to have a look, but I couldn’t see Rex in his tree. The kids insisted and kept pointing. I know there are also free roaming leopards on the farm, but they are pretty stealthy and wouldn’t come so close to the houses. Yet the kids just kept insisting and dragged me outside. There, about 20 feet from the kindergarten, they pointed out leopard prints in the sand. Now, I wouldn’t know a leopard print from a dog’s print so maybe they were pulling my leg. Still, I could console myself that little Denzel (who would holding my hand and looking up at me all worried with his big brown eyes) would make much easier prey than big old me. Not that I was really planning on throwing Denzel to the leopard. In all reality, the leopard (if it was indeed a leopard and not a figment of the kids’ imagination) would certainly go for a chicken first.

The battle with the 'beest continues

After my last encounter with my evil nemesis, the snorting wildebeest, I asked the wildlife volunteer if wildebeest have been known to attack humans. She claimed this was ridiculous and even if their snorting sounded fierce, they would eventually run away.

Feeling fortified with a renewed confidence in my personal safety, I took my traditional walk along the river bed as the sun was setting. Parts of the track are sandy and don’t make the loud crunching sound that you hear when walking on the gravel trail. I was wandering along, listening to the birds, contemplating the meaning of life, when right behind me, at a range of less than 20 feet, I heard a loud snort. My heart leapt to my throat. My mind frantically searching for my “yo mamma is so ugly . . . “ wildebeest insult as I swung around to face the imminent peril . . . . . .

Running up behind me in her sneakers on the sand was the wildlife volunteer – snorting . . . . and laughing hysterically as I swung around in panic.

Okay, so maybe the wildebeest isn’t my greatest nemesis anymore. I was taking a hike through the mountains this morning and I heard a yell that sounded vaguely like “stop”. It was loud. It sounded human and it sure stopped me in my tracks as I looked around to find out who was out there. The yell came again, sounding very agitated. I scanned the hill opposite and a big, hairy baboon had climbed a tree and was staring me down.

There had been some talk the night before at dinner that they had found baboon in the enclosure of the three-

legged cheetah. The boss was extremely concerned. Baboons kill cheetah. Baboon would sure make easy pickings of a cheetah with only three legs and with nowhere to run because it can’t climb over the fence like the baboon can. There are a lot of baboons around since we saw the big mob of them cross the riverbed last week. There had also been a discussion about whether baboons were territorial. The general wisdom is that baboons are not territorial over their home range, but male baboons are territorial about their females. So I tried to explain to the yelling baboon that I wasn’t interested in his women. He kept yelling at me. Since I was all alone in the middle of the African bush and I know baboons are mean enough to kill cheetah, I thought I had better err on the side of caution. I backed off and retraced my steps back to the house.

Apologies to George Orwell

I came across my old nemesis the snorting wildebeest yesterday as I was taking a walk along the river on the road to the farm gate. This time there was no scrambling effort to run. Out of the silence of the bush came a loud, threatening snort. It was followed 10 seconds later with another louder snort, and then another. I looked up. The ‘beest was about 50 feet away staring me down. He caught me unawares. The tone of the snort seemed to suggest “those pants sure make your bum look big.

” I was taken aback by the suddenness of the insult and the steadfast way he stood his ground. Shaken, I turned on my heels and walked back towards the house. You may have foiled me this time, you snorting, foul-breathed wildebeest. But as Pepe La Pew (the great rogue romantic and philosopher) would say “those who fight and run away, they live to fight another day.” Next time I’ll be more prepared. Maybe something that starts with “yo Momma’s so ugly . . . . etc etc”. This morning over breakfast a huge troop of baboons crossed the river bed to the stand of trees just opposite the terrace. As I drank my morning coffee, I watched them comes in waves. Whole families, some of the baboons mere babes, running in from the bush to congregate in a huddle near the farmhouse. Two of the largest baboons climbed to the top of the largest tree and sat staring at us. Studying us. Marking our every movement through the house. If I didn’t know better, I would think they were plotting something. As I walked back towards my stone hut, the cheetah looked at me from his enclosure. He seemed to be pacing around the gate in an irritated fashion. He opened his jaws and beneath the low meowing I swear I heard him mutter “four legs good, two legs bad”. With three legs, no wonder he was looking nervous and confused. Or maybe I’ve just been in the bush too long.

Oryx for dinner

I was sitting in the kitchen having lunch with the other volunteers this afternoon when the owner walked in with Bully (his great big hunting dog). Bully was filthy and the boss was looking very sweaty and had blood on his clothes.

They had just come back from hunting an oryx for dinner. The owner had shot a “young female” oryx. When asked why he didn’t shoot one of the bucks he grinned and said “I don’t like young females” trying to get a rise out of the three young females at the table. But really the animal in question had just been standing at the right angle to get a good shot. He says he shot too low and Bully went racing after the wounded oryx the run it down and corner it. A second shot brought the animal down.

There is no sport hunting on the farm anymore. Most of the animals have been restocked after they stopped cattle farming in the 1960s and opened the property up as a guest house (the first in Namibia). There are some sport hunting farms that ship animals in just so Rambo types can chase them down and shoot them. A neighboring farm offers sport hunting of leopards and the boss is appalled and trying to get it stopped. The guest house proudly boasts “Three Flowers” which is an ecological rating for resorts. However, there is minimal, sustainable hunting for supplying the kitchen.

Since we’ve been eating nothing but beef for the last two weeks, it will be nice to have oryx for dinner. Hmmmmmm, oryx. It tastes just like beef, but it has a much cooler name so I can now bore people at dinner parties in California with the subtle differences. “Yes, indeed, this steak tastes somewhat like that freshly killed oryx I had once in Namibia. We sliced a bloody chunk of roast right off its haunches. I bit into the bullet and it nearly broke my teeth!

” My future plans include become an insufferable bore!

Snorting and clicking

I took a walk around the Khomas mountains yesterday before dinner. When the wind is completely still, the silence of the bush is unworldly. Birds seem to have already gone to roost at that time of the evening. The only sound is the crunching of shoes in the quartz gravel and the faint sloshing sound of my water bottle. It almost feels like you are in a sensory deprivation chamber with only two distinct sounds being fed to you.

Half way through my walk I startled some wildebeest. They made a quick, scrambling noise and then trotted ahead of me. I was just as startled as them. Then one of them decided to stand his ground. He stared at me and snorted. I waved my arms and shouted back. There was a standoff. Wildebeest won’t attack, but they are much bigger than me. He snorted. I waved and yelled some made-

up wildebeest insult about what yummy steak he would make. He didn’t seem to like that and I won the day and continued on my merry way back down the mountain. I made the mistake of inviting too many guests to the kindergarten today. They turned up all at once in a big bunch of six – two families with teenage children. The poor kiddies where outnumbered and immediately looked intimidated. The kids all have huge, forceful personalities, but they completely clammed up. These six big people who were feeling so good about themselves for visiting a kindergarten in Africa were basically saying “hey, kid, play with me”. “Hey kid, do you want some pencils.” “Hey kid, pose over here away from the window for a photo.” I looked up amongst the scrum of photographers at one point and a very overbearing German woman standing five feet away from me had her camera pointed right at me for a “candid shot of the teacher”. BLOODY EXCUSE ME!!!! If you want to take a photo of me, you have only to ask. I am not a static display of local color and that is just plain rude. I have to give the kids credit. They mostly kept their cool and were respectful, but they absolutely refused to perform a cute act. Good for them! They were having none of it and the guests didn’t seem to realize at all how miserable they were making the kids with such overwhelming fawning. At one point I had the kids sitting at a table playing with play-dough and a circle of guests totally surrounding us. I reached out for something and Patrick smacked my hand. Now, Patrick knows that hitting anyone in the class will get him physically thrown out of the room. Hitting the teacher will bring down the wrath of God! I looked into his eyes and I could see the clear message “please get rid of these people.” So I did. Patrick was a perfect gentleman the rest of the day. One of the employees had a baby yesterday (a new sister for one of the girls in my class). We first heard it was a boy and they were going to name it !ontas (or some such thing). The ! is the symbol for the clicking noise they make in the Damara language. I thought it was a bit limiting for a child in the modern world to have a name beginning with a click. I’m doing the genealogy of the families at the lodge and none of them have clicks in their names. Their names are overwhelmingly European. A couple of hours later we found out it was actually a girl and they are going to name her Geraldine. I only have two weeks left at the guest house. It makes me feel sad just thinking about leaving – although a nice spicy meal of non-German food would be very welcome right about now.

Strange tribal tatoos

The kiddies in my class like to test the sharpness of the colored pencils by poking them into cheeks. Sometimes they use they own cheeks. Sometimes they use the cheeks of their classmates who participate with gusto. If the child cries out “ouch” then the pencil is sharp enough for the coloring task at hand. If they don’t cry out, then it’s back to the sharpener. They seem to enjoy the process, so I don’t try to stop them.

My younger sister managed to tattoo her own forehead with a colored pencil when she was 7 years old. She somehow managed to jam a light blue colored pencil into her forehead with such force that the color got under the skin and even today, 30 years later, if you look hard enough you can see the blue spot.

Now, logically, it is possible that all this cheek poking with sharp pencils will occasionally break the skin. I wonder if they will end up with permanently tattooed brightly colored freckles. Maybe some anthropologist will come by in years to come and marvel at the strange tribal tattooing.

Black Mamba and a sunset the color of cotton candy

I learned something new yesterday. Poisonous refers to a toxin that is ingested. Venomous refers to a toxin that is injected. Therefore, there is no such thing as a “poisonous snake” unless you fancy eating one for dinner.

The black mamba snake just outside the guest house gate went down a treat on the game drive yesterday. It seems they are rare in these parts, so having one so close to the house is rather exciting. While it is the world’s more aggressive and venomous (not poisonous) snake, the guests seemed to be thrilled. I just happened to be on the game drive yesterday and we followed it in the safari truck for about 10 minutes snapping pictures. Over dinner last night the owner refused to believe that it was a black mamba until we all pulled out our cameras and proved it to him.

A whole family group of giraffes have wandered into the riverbed in front of the house. I was going to take a wander down there to gawk at them this evening. But, considering that’s exactly where we saw the black mamba, I think I’ll give it a miss.

I got talking to one of the guest last night who is a volunteer for the VSO (Volunteer Service Organization) at the University of Namibia where her job is to facilitate the studies of disabled students. She has been doing it for 10 months and it has been an assignment from hell. She has two quadriplegic students that she is supposed to be helping. Both of them really need 24 hour care. She has no help and doesn’t have the body strength to shift them in their seats if they complain of being uncomfortable in their wheelchairs. Plus she is taking care of other visually and hearing impaired students all of whom need constant attention. The faculty is unresponsive and doesn’t want her there. When she complains, they just ignore her. She is living in Windhoek where invariably all of her volunteer friends have been mugged at knife point during their time in the city. She had come to the guest house just to get away from it for a day.

When we got back from the game drive, I cleaned myself up and went to tend the little bar in the lapa. There was a magnificent blue and pink sunset and I was early, so I poured myself a glass of wine and wandered to the lapa lounge area that looks over the dry river bed. The eland were chomping at the grass about 15 feet away and the sky was starting to fill with the stars that on moonless nights are blinding. The air was hot and still and you could hear the scurry of other animals wandering down the river bed. The new horse volunteer came by for a chat. She just arrived from Minnesota two days ago and is all young and bright eyed and excited to be in Africa. We grabbed our flash lights and spot lighted the riverbank to see what we could see out there. The kitchen was cooking up a feast of beef stew with green beans and pasta with apple fritters for dessert and a new and more-

interesting-than-usual group of English speaking guests were starting to gather for dinner. We all sat up to 11pm in the warm Namibian night solving the world’s problems over wine and Amarula. I’m so glad I didn’t volunteer with the VSO.

Baboons don't like cameras either

It seems the baboons don’t like the wildlife surveillance cameras either. The camera near the dam was found scattered and smashed. The last photo on the memory card was a big baboon face. We’re going to have to find a new secure casing for the camera equipment.

One of the mothers of the children in my class seems to have contracted the measles. It’s either that, or some other type of allergic reaction. I’m happy to say that my mother was very diligent when it came to getting us vaccinated, so I’m in no danger. But people still die from measles here in Africa.

The boss has it in his head to have a big, Michael Jackson moonwalking competition here at the guest house on Saturday afternoon. The kiddies in my class have been bursting out with the chorus of “Beat it” the whole time I’ve been here. They take their Michael Jackson very seriously here. I have to say the Damara aren’t very exuberant people. You might say they are shy. I think getting any of them up on stage is going to be hard. They don’t want to embarrass themselves. Whatever happens, I will be right there with my trusty video camera.

Gore splattered on my camera

Since yesterday was my day off, I thought I might as well go and get some video of the cheetah and leopard feeding. Once again the guide let me sit in the passenger’s seat of the battered old safari vehicle with no doors. However, this time he parked the passenger side on the side of the cheetahs! The cheetah’s were literally 2 feet away. If I had been so inclined I could have reached out and poked them in the eye. Yan (the guide who feeds the cheetah) sat next to me on the passenger seat and fed the cheetah from there so he could give the tourists in my truck some better photo angles. I had my video camera rolling the whole time. I was so close I couldn’t pan back far enough to get a good shot.

Yan was throwing the meat into the air and the cheetahs were catching it about three feet away. I don’t know whether it was the backsplash from a meat toss, or whether it flew from the cheetah’s gnashing jaws, but a small chunk of meat flew up in the air and landed squarely on my video camera.

So, technically, my camera was splattered with gore during a cheetah feeding frenzy. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I’ll be old and grey and sitting in a nursing home and the people around me will be saying “oh no, not that gore-

on-the-camera story again.” Of course by then I’ll have embellished the story to last just over an hour and it will start something like “Now listen, you young whippersnapper! You think your cat is ferocious! Let me tell you the story of when I was young and working on a safari farm in Namibia. Now we didn’t have those puny house cats you have today. Noooooo. We kept wild cheetah to play with. Some had three legs. Some had four legs. But if they had their mind set, they would rip you limb from limb like nobody’s business. One day as I was feeding the cheetah . . . . . . .” I chose not to spoil a good story with the truth like “the cheetahs on the farm are almost tame”, “I was never in any danger”, “cheetah aren’t particularly dangerous and would never attack a human.” (This last paragraph is for the sake of my Mum – just in case she is reading this and gets needlessly worried that I’m taking risks.)

The dreaded travel writers

The dreaded travel writers showed up last night. I presume they are travel writers. They are the first young, good-

looking men I have seen here in three weeks. They turned up at the bar last night looking grumpy, carrying a big camera, taking pictures of everything and not engaging in conversation no matter how hard we tried. Perhaps they were annoyed they were sent to deepest darkest Africa and not the assignment they wanted in the South of France! I found their complete grumpiness so amusing that I could hardly stop myself from laughing. They listened intently to the conversation over dinner, but not once joined in. This morning I saw them taking a photo of the food on the breakfast table. I asked them if they had taken lots of photos during their trip and one grunted “yes, 600 photos on the first day. That is our job.” Oh the intrigue. Also last night at the dinner table I found the first people who didn’t have a good time in Namibia. Everyone up until now has been waxing lyrical about the country and laughing off the various misadventures (luggage lost after it fell out the back of a safari truck, flat tires, bogging their cars in sand, etc). However the German couple last night were whining “Namibia is so expensive – for the price we are paying to stay here tonight, we could have stayed at the Ritz in Paris”. Or “it’s so hot and dry, one minute after you get out of the swimming pool you are completely dry, hot and sweaty again”, “the dry air makes my skin go horrible and my hair like straw”. Yes, all these things are true, but THIS IS AFRICA!!!! What on earth did they expect? Today is my “day off”. It is Sunday so there is no school. I missed my opportunity to take a morning hike. You have to plan to be back inside by 11am at the very latest, otherwise it is just too hot and unpleasant. Maybe I’ll take a walk to the dam for sunset instead and see if I can spot the rhino. Rhino tracks for the big male were spotted on the game drive yesterday, so he’s somewhere nearby.

A day in the life of the Guest House

I seem to have settled into the daily routine here at the guest house.

At 7:

30am we have breakfast on the terrace overlooking the dry river bed. If there are too many guests, the volunteers eat in the kitchen. The cooks at the guest house make their own german brown bread and it has enough fiber to unblock a drain! I tend to slather it with gobs of butter to make it palatable. I’m sure the bread is good for me, but I seem to be eating my own body weight in butter. They serve breakfast continental style with cold meat and granola and yoghurt. Sometimes the eland or wildebeest will wander past during breakfast. At 9:30 I head towards the school. The employee housing is just 100 meters from my room. I bought a couple of Preschool teaching books when I was in Windhoek last week. Since I only have four students, I just trace the lessons through the paper four times. At 10am the kiddies turn up. They give me a big grin and a big hug and look like they are ever-so pleased to be in school. That sentiment doesn’t necessarily last very long. Trying to explain the lessons to them is difficult. I’m not sure if they are getting it at all. I plough along regardless. We got to the letter “O” today, but it probably was just an excuse for them to color in an Ostrich. By 1pm the school is finished. I head to the kitchen for lunch of more brown bread with gobs of butter and cold meat. I like eating in the kitchen away from the guests. The wildlife volunteer is usually there and we have a chat and I read the “African Geographic Magazine”. By 2pm it feels like an oven outside. The air is extremely dry and the sun extremely bright. All the staff go home for a few hours. Only the crazy pale German tourists without any common sense decide to sit by the pool and get a tan. I took a dip in the pool once the first week I was here. It was surprising cold. For a few hours I stay in my stone hut reading a book, taking a nap, working on my projects and my blog. I try to make a habit of taking a walk at 6 o’clock as the sun goes down. Today it’s raining, so I’m just going to sit tight. Strangely the rain screws up my internet broadband reception. Until the clouds clear, I can’t get a signal. At 7:30pm I go and tend bar. There are only a maximum of 20 guests per night, and there are three of us to help at the bar, so it isn’t very strenuous. Usually I just pour myself a glass of wine and chat to the guests, make a couple of gin and tonics, pour a few beers. It’s the same conversations every night “did you go to the cheetah feeding? How was that? Did you go on the game drive? What animals did you see? Have you been to Etosha yet?” (Etosha is the big game park in Namibia and the main tourist draw. I have yet to find a tourist who hasn’t been to Etosha or isn’t planning on going to Etosha.) At 8pm is dinner. All the guests sit around a big table in the dry-grass roofed lapa area. It’s always red meat – usually game like kudu, wildebeest or oryx. The table is lit with hurricane lanterns and the walls are decorated with a big zebra skin and animal skulls and various “African themed” ornaments. Sometimes the guests are quite pleasant (when you can find one that doesn’t mind speaking English). Other nights are painful where the guests just don’t want to talk or seem to have nothing to say to each other. The owner has been doing the same dinner service every night for 20 years. He knows how to coax a conversation out of just about anyone. It helps that he speaks five languages. With any luck the guest are finished by about 10pm. I help clear up and take the dishes to the kitchen, then I stagger back to my room and go to sleep.

Where is my Indiana Jones hat when I need it

I missed the baboons! It seems baboons came to frollick outside the school yesterday. The kiddies tried to tell me and, because I don’t understand a word they say, I told them to sit down and do their work.

Poor Bully (the great big dog) got attacked by elands last night. Elands have long horns and Bully decided to pick a fight with one of them as it came walking through the yard. It seems being a bully really doesn’t pay off!

Really there is nothing around here that will hurt you unless you pick a fight with it. Most of the animals will defend themselves. When I go walking I wear by clodhopping boots so that any creatures will hear me a mile away and they won’t think I’ve snuck up on them.

The owner told me of a lost archaeological site somewhere on the farm. There is a game that is played all around Africa that is usually made out of wood with cups carved into it. There are two lines of 8 cups running parallel. You take pebbles and move the pebbles from one cup to the next. I’m not sure of the rules, but it is very strategic. Each country has a different name for the game.

Somewhere along the riverbed these game cups have been carved into the stone. Someone found then about 20 years ago and said there were so many that they called the site “little Las Vegas”. They could never find the site again. Maybe the sands had shifted along the river bed to cover it up. It might be fun to go and look for it.

The owner also gave me a document on “human development” that was written by a past volunteer which shows how the development of the farm, the new (relative) prosperity and the use of technology by the farm workers has effected their culture. One point was that the introduction of television has made it so the younger generation is no longer taught the traditional Damara games. I seem to have a captive audience with the kiddies. Maybe I’ll see if I can get one of the older folks to help me reintroduce these games.

The little storyteller

Denzel’s mother came to class yesterday. She has a little baby called Valentina who is about 3 months ago. A real cutie. It seems that Denzel is a little storyteller. A bit like my nephew, Oliver. He is always telling long stories with a big grin on his face. Obviously I didn’t understand Denzel. I thought it was just baby babbling. It was great fun to have his mother translate for me. She said he came home from the afternoon tracking cheetah by the river and told her what fun he had had and how he had fallen in the water. I’m happy to hear the kiddies had as much fun as I did.

Stoffle (the assistant manager) got stung by a wasp this afternoon. We rummage through three different first aid kits that are kept on the farm trying desperately to find an antihistamine. No such luck. His whole neck has swollen up in lumps. Since we are 20kms from the road and 50kms from the nearest medical help, we can only hope that whatever reaction he is having is self-

limiting. If it does get worse, there are plenty of farm vehicles to take him into town. He seems to be okay now. I found out what the enormous scars on the owner’s dog are from. The dog is huge – about the size of a St. Bernard. I guess it’s a hunting dog and is a mixed breed of some sort. Apparently he got in a fight with a warthog. The warthog was probably half his size, but the tusks did quite a bit of damage. But they are old scars and “Bully” is actually a total sweety. That’s a good thing considering he’s probably bigger than me. I was worried that all these late dinners of wildebeest steak and oryx ragu were going to make me fat. Not so. I seem to be disappearing with the old Africa diet. It works every time.

Photo opportunity caring

I’m not sure I approve of “photo opportunity caring”. Over dinner last night a German couple asked if they could come and visit the kindergarten. So this morning I took them to the school just before class started and introduced them to the kids as they arrived. The owner has a donation jar for the kindergarten in the office near where people pay their bill. From what I’ve heard there is more than $1,

000 in the fund but the school has nothing but one functional, small table and another small table that is so rickety it falls over whenever a kid leans on it the wrong way. The chairs are children’s safari fold-up chairs that are ripped and falling apart. There is a filthy bed mattress in the corner of the room where the children can take a nap. I think my mission is going to be to wrestle some of that donation money away from the owner and force him to buy some proper furniture. Anyway, the German couple came by, acted concerned, hugged the children, took some photos and then went away with the promise to contribute to the kindergarten fund. It felt strangely like I was pimping out the kids for donation money. “Give these folks a hug and we’ll get new furniture.” But am I any better? I wander into the kids lives on my big Namibian adventure, make a small effort to teach them something, and then disappear from their lives. There is something very wrong with Patrick. I have been told he has tested HIV negative even though both his parents are HIV positive. However, he has strange episodes in class where he will grab his chest, get very glassy-eyed and look like he’s going to pass out. He also has a chronic cough. The first time this happened I thought he was going to keel over dead right in front of me and I sent him home to his mother. His mother sent him right back to school. Today it happened again and I got him to lay down for half an hour and it seemed to pass. Then he didn’t eat any lunch. Poor kid. I’m going to have to make sure this isn’t being ignored by his mother.

School Photo

Cheetah tracking

I went cheetah tracking with the kiddies as the sun went down last night. I was sitting outside my door writing a couple of e-

mails and updating my blog around 6 o’clock. I don’t get any broadband connection inside my stone hut so I have to sit outside. During the day the sun is so strong I can’t see the screen, so the only chance I get to work on the internet is late in the afternoon. All seven children from my class came running up to me as I sat outside my hut saying what I thought was “teacher, teacher, teacher”, but I soon realized they were really saying “cheetah, cheetah, cheetah”. I looked up and saw a cheetah sitting about 15 meters away from my door, right amongst the guest rooms and outside the visitors center. We all knew it was likely to be the tame three-legged cheetah out for a walk with Stoffle (the assistant manager at the guest house), but it seemed like a fun idea to track the cheetah. So I grabbed my video camera and got the children to follow the cheetah’s tracks down towards the riverbed. There had been a couple of days of rain, so there was quite a bit of water in the river. The children took off their shoes and followed the “rhino tracks” wading up the river to the big pond that lies at the bottom of the small rock plateau where the main guest house sits. The kids had a metal fish trap and were puddling around trying to catch me a fish. It was so much fun. I got some great video of the ragamuffin bunch of Herero kids playing in the water and climbing on the rocks. It’s beautiful down on the river bed. There was a full moon rising and a bunch of animals swaggering by for a drink. Then poor little Denzel, the smallest of the group, tripped and fell into the water. He was shivering badly, and looked so sad. I didn’t really think he was in danger of hypothermia (considering it was 27 degrees C), but I thought I had better get him home. I took the poor chap by the hand and we all wandered back down the river bed, past the three-legged cheetah enclosure (just so we could say we found him) and home in time for supper. At dinner I heard the owner tell the same story for the 5th time. The wildlife volunteer had thought she heard lions one night, but it turns out that the male ostrich can make a sound very similar to the roar of a lion. The story gets longer and more involved each time it’s told – all about the hapless wildlife volunteer who couldn’t tell a bird from a lion. I did my laundry today. The air is so dry that my clothes were bone dry in three hours while hanging in my closet in a dark room. It’s a good thing I didn’t bother to bring a hair dryer. Ten minutes in the sun does the trick.

Saturday school

It appears the rhino tracking cameras are not rhino proof. The wildlife volunteer went to change the batteries in the camera at the far end of the farm and found that it had been broken off its post and stomped into the ground. There were rhino tracks all around and leading up to the camera, but the camera didn’t capture anything before it got stomped. The batteries were probably already dead. These rhinos sure are camera shy!

I held a Saturday class at the school today. I honestly didn’t think anyone would turn up, but instead I got three recent graduates as well as my four little students. The three older kids go to school in Windhoek and come back to the farm for weekends. Their photos and work (with their names written on them) is still hanging on the walls of the kindergarten. I found (typical for Africa) that they could recite their ABCs with great confidence but when you put a letter in front of them, they couldn’t tell you what it was. Or when you asked them to write a letter, they were lost. So that’s something I can teach them.

I need to get working on the genealogy for the local Damara people who work on the farm. A former volunteer has it all in an excel spreadsheet, but I need to transfer it into a “Family Tree Maker” program that is only in German. Justina (who works in the kitchen) will be helping me with adding the details of education and what they died of. Unfortunately, I was with the owner when he asked Justina to help me with it. She was rolling her eyes. Obviously she has been through this process before - every time a new volunteer shows up or the boss gets some idea in his head. I’m going to have to find a way to get the information in a less formal way. But Justina is very friendly. She told me she prefers to be known by her hip hop name – Justified!

However, Justina might be pissed off with me today. She came to the school this morning to enroll the terrorizing toddler who breaks things. He is far too young. I would guess around 12 – 14 months. The owner made it perfectly clear that I am not to act as a babysitter and shouldn’t accept anything that would stop me from actually teaching the kids something. So I turned her away.

I was very annoyed yesterday when Vivian (a student who has the same mother as the terrorizing toddler) told me that her mother had instructed her to wait at the school until she came to pick her up (or I guessed that’s what she told me – it’s hard when you have to communicate with a couple of shared words “Vivian mummy here” and a lot of hand signals). I waited for an hour and a half before I sent her home with another student. The community is very very small – maybe 30 people. I know she would be looked after.

Other than that, life goes on at the guest house. The last couple of days there has been zero English spoken around the dinner table. I suppose my German is improving, but I was very happy to find a couple of young Dutch people at the bar to chat with after dinner.

The guesthouse is near Windhoek, so it is usually the first or last stop for people going to or from the airport. The “just arrived” people are usually very excited but jetlagged. The “just leaving” people are usually waxing lyrical about Namibia. I haven’t heard anyone yet complain about having a miserable time in Namibia and that’s saying something considering how much Germans like to complain.

Rhino Tracking

I made my first attempt at rhino tracking yesterday. The rhinos were let loose about two years ago and are rarely seen, but they have set up motion-

activated cameras near the dam where they do occasionally see rhino tracks. I went with the wildlife volunteer to change the batteries in the camera and poke around the water’s edge for tracks. In all honesty, that will probably be the full extent of my “rhino tracking” during my time here. She gave me an impromptu lesson on wildlife tracks and poo identification. The guides she is teaching aren’t taking much interest, so she is happy to have someone who listens to her. I’ll be an expert before too long! We’re still having luminous thunder storms in the afternoons, so the air was lovely and cool at the dam. We saw a herd of wildebeest drinking at the water’s edge but they ran away as soon as they saw us. If you want to see the wildlife wandering in for a drink in the late afternoon, you really have to walk in, stake yourself a spot under a tree and don’t move. The lovely thing about being on a private guest farm is that you are very likely to be alone by the waterhole until 6:30pm. At 6:30 the “evening game drive” safari truck comes by with a load of tourists and a cooler full of beer for a sundowner. But that’s a good thing! The guides are my friends now and will happily provide me with a beer and a ride home. I went on the 7am “mountain game drive” yesterday. Wow! It was beautiful but STEEP!!! It felt like being on a bumpy roller coaster and you had to hang on for dear life on top of the totally exposed, rickety safari truck. I love the total disregard for safety in Africa. It’s such a change from the American nanny-state. There is a very odd species of mountain zebra up there somewhere, but we weren’t lucky enough to see them that day. I’ll have to try again. I went for a ride into Windhoek yesterday with the owner so I could pick up a broadband internet modem. There is no other (cheap) way for me to get off the farm other than catching a ride with the weekly shopping trip. It was so funny. A little more than a week ago I was a downtown San Francisco dweller – all sophisticated and urbane. This week I caught a lift in a dusty old Landrover into Windhoek and was walking around the mall wearing my farm clothes and my big hat, looking (and feeling) like a hick that had just blown in from the bush. There are so many Germans here, I can pass for a local and my accent comes across as “English South African”. I was talking to the guesthouse owner about the children at the kindergarten. For the first few days they were a bit difficult to handle, but now we have an understanding and I actually got them to complete TWO written tasks today. The trick is to hide the written task inside a coloring-in exercise. Patrick and Patricia are twins. They were born early and I think Patrick has some learning difficulties. Patricia is a sweet, very smart girl whose teeth are rotting out of her mouth at age 5. Their mother is HIV positive and doesn’t take much care of them and their father died of AIDS earlier this year. Patrick and Patricia were tested for HIV and they both are negative. The father was a loyal employee for many years, but now that he is gone, the mother and the two kids need to vacate the employee housing. The owner has given them six months to find a new situation and to get settled by the beginning of the new school term in January. Poor Patrick and Patricia. I wonder if it’s really possible to dig themselves out of such a crappy start in life. I hope so. I intend to arm them with their ABCs! I’m sure that will come in handy. Anyway, I finally got my internet connection set up today. It’s slow (literally it is 265kps – that’s kilobits!!). I’m finally up and running (well, maybe not “running”, maybe up and crawling), so I will try and post to this blog every couple of days. It took me three hours of frustration before I realized that my stone hut walls are blocking the signal, so I have to go outside to get online.

Yesterday I had nothing better to do in the afternoon, so I went on the cheetah feeding. I finally feel like a local. The guide, Kennedy, asked if I wanted to get in the front of the safari truck instead of jumping in the back with the tourists. The tourist seats in the safari truck are about 5 feet off the ground and enclosed up to the railing. I thought this was a great idea until I realized that the cab of the safari truck didn’t have any doors and is about 2 feet off the ground. So the ravenous cheetahs were basically prancing and fighting for food about 3 feet from my pink exposed flesh. Still, the guides seemed to be pretty relaxed about it, and since they feed the cheetah every day, I guessed they knew what they were doing. Cheetahs can be pretty tame. They have to goad ferociousness out of them by throwing the meat in strategic ways to make the cats jump and fight for it.

I had another morning at the school today. It felt good to walk out of the quiet German farmhouse and into the settlement where the locals live There was some African music playing and the smell of food cooking over open fires. It’s funny to see the guides when they are at home. They are really the big, successful men in their community and they strut around with importance and confidence. They all came to visit the school and it was great to see that side of them. When they are at the farmhouse and waiting on tourists and following orders, they seem much more introverted and hunched.

I ate lunch with the wildlife volunteer. She had just given the guides she is training a “surprise test” and was giving me the quiz just to pass the time over a lunch of bread and dried oryx meat. It was multiple choice, but I scored just as well (if not better) than the guides. I guess watching all those nature documentaries has paid off!

I’m trying desperately to get into town to buy a broadband modem so I can get connected to the internet. There is usually a shopping trip on Thursdays, but whether or not they will have space for me is another story. I hope I can go. I’m feeling rather cut off (which is a good and bad thing), but I feel like I need to be connected in case something goes terribly wrong at home. I also want to make sure my family knows I am alright. They do tend to worry when I disappear into the African bush.

Ehland visit

We were visited by a herd of eland overnight. I heard a bunch of hooves stomping around my hut and I woke up to find tracks right outside my door and all over and around the sheds, campground, and right up to the door of the main house. They sure had left their share of eland poo on the lawn next to the pool.

We also have a new dinner guest. A baby python has taken up residence about 10 feet from the dinner table in the lapa. It’s so cute and small at the moment that the guests find it very amusing and take lots of photos. No-

one has yet freaked out. The owner says that in his 50 years in Namibia he has only come across 2 pythons, so it is a pretty strange sight in these parts. The local staff want to kill it or at least capture it and move it away from the house. At the moment it’s only about a meter long, isn’t poisonous and probably doesn’t have the strength to strangle your ankle (let alone do a person any permanent harm). However, they do grow up to 5 meters long, so maybe it makes good sense to move it while it is young. I took a quick powerwalk along the 3km mountain hike after breakfast this morning. The trail goes up and over the Khomas mountains that I see from my bathroom window. I didn’t see any animals (except a wild horse), but I did walk past the three-legged cheetah enclosure. The cheetah was rescued a year ago and then broke its leg while playing with a toy. They amputated the leg, so now it can’t be let back into the wild. It is completely tame and the tourists can take the three-legged cheetah for a walk. I really must do that one morning. The big question is – how fast can a three-legged cheetah run? Faster than a two-legged man? I wonder if someone will eventually find out the hard way. I started teaching at the kindergarten today. I only have 4 students and one toddler who come in to wreak havoc and break things, but doesn’t actually belong in the class. The kids are Patrick, Patricia, Vivian and Denzel. I wonder if he is named after Denzel Washington, or whether Denzel Washington has an old African name. I’ll have to find out. The kids turned up with their stubborn hats on. The first day is all about finding people’s abilities and limits. I tried to find out their abilities. They tried to find out my limits. Besides coloring, I don’t think they have held pencils before. The abcs are totally mysteries to them. I guess that makes it easier. Now I just have to teach them to write one new letter a day for 6 weeks. After a futile hour of trying to get them to copy the letter “a” over and over again, it was finally game time. For the first hour they had pretended they didn’t understand me at all and spoke zero English. Strangely at game time, when they wanted to be understood, they were speaking lots of English words and accurately following instructions in English. They finally settled down over coloring at the end of the day and were having a nice little chat amongst themselves. The local language (which is a derivate of San which is the oldest language in the world) includes several clicking and kissing sounds. It really was a joy to hear them chatting and clicking away around the coloring-in table.

Arriving at the guest house

Flying into Windhoek airport was a strange experience. The runway was out in the middle of the savannah and it was totally deserted. There was literally only one other plane on the tarmac and we taxied right up to the terminal to get to the passport control. We just had to walk about 20 meters over little zebra crossing and through some glass doors. Since this is “German Africa” everything was spotless and well organized

The night I arrived there was an unseasonal thunder storm. Wet season is usually November and December so the locals were a bit mystified as to why it would be raining in September.

The whole drive from the airport I had the usual “first day at school” nerves. What will it be like? Will they like me? Will they be weirdoes? Will I be welcome? What if I make a bad first impression with my jet lag and fetid stench from two days without washing?

I arrived at the guest house around 7:

30pm and was greeted warmly by Leon, the assistant manager. It was already dark as he showed me to my room which turned out to be an annex to the saddlery. I would call it a “stone hut”. The walls inside and out are raw river stones held together with cement. It’s perfectly nice and a little rustic, but has a modern bathroom and lovely hot and cold running water and electric lights. The guest rooms are much posher, but I’m not spending $200/night so I can’t complain. I then went to meet the folks for dinner at the main house. They were thankfully very welcoming and I was introduced to Ali (the wildlife volunteer) and a couple of the staff. The bar/lapa/dining area was beautiful, dimly lit with hurricane lamps with a long table set up for the 16 guests to enjoy a communal dinner. The bar is a gorgeous, organic space using raw wood with a three foot high statue of an elephant (which is a little strange because we don’t have elephants around here). In a desperate attempt to make a good first impression I chatted with the guests and tried to ignore the fact that my ankles were swollen and one stiff breeze and I would have fallen over fast asleep. I wanted to jump in and appear useful straight away, so I helped with the dinner service. Moving around also helped me stay awake. This was my first introduction to the Germanity of Namibia. The guests range from skinny young Germans, to pudgy mid-aged Germans right up to really fat old Germans. For dinner we had spaetzel, red cabbage and roast oryx. The entire table was speaking German except for a couple up my end of from South Africa who were speaking English. The South African made a comment that nearly had me fall off my chair. It wasn’t his fault really. He had a couple of daughters in their early twenties and obviously was a protective parent. I was telling him about my trip to The Gambia and he said “how do you stop your parents from having heart attacks when you go away?” I had to stop myself from saying “well, honestly, I haven’t been very successful in that regard”. I finally staggered back to my stone hut in the saddlery around 10pm and fell fast asleep. I still hadn’t seen anything in the daylight. When I finally saw Namibia by the morning light, I was stunned by the view out of my bathroom window. Over my sink is a large picture window that looks out over the stables and past the river bed and onto the Khomas mountains. It is the only window in my stone hut so I am tempted to set up my office in the bathroom. It’s breathtaking. Maybe I’ll just spend a lot of time brushing my teeth and gazing out the bathroom window. Breakfast on the terrace in the main farmhouse reminded me of a quote from Fawlty Towers. No, the owner wasn’t like Basil Fawlty and the guest house is very well run. But the quote goes something like “well, what do you expect to see out of a Torquie hotel window? Sydney Opera House perhaps? Or wildebeest sweeping majestically . . . . “ As I sat and drank my coffee looking over the dry river bed, a herd of wildebeest came sweeping majestically by. Because of the unseasonal rain, there was some water in the river bed and it attracted the animals. It was a fine greeting to southern Africa. Over breakfast I was chatting to a German tourist and we decided to take a hike together to the Andreas dam There are about 20km of marked hiking trails around the lodge. The dam was set up as a water hole for the game animals. The track ran through a gully near and we came across an eland that appeared to have been unsuccessfully shot. There was what looked to be a bullet wound in its rump. It was slowly dying on the trail. There wasn’t much we could do but leave it there and let the owner of the farm know. In the afternoon I went on my first cheetah feeding. As long as there is space in the safari vehicle and I’m not taking it away from a paying guest, then I’m allowed to do pretty much any activity on the farm. The cheetah feeding is the farm’s major tourist attraction. The owner rescued a couple of “trouble cheetahs” that would otherwise have been shot and put them in a large 10 acre enclosure. Those 2 cheetahs then had 4 cubs which are now fully grown. That day a whole new busload of tourist arrived for the cheetah drive so we had three vehicles and about 30 tourists all with their big lensed cameras and safari binoculars. The cheetahs rely on the meat from the people, so they are always happy to see the safari vehicles and prance around the jeeps with no problem. They would literally come within a foot of the jeeps, jump at thrown meat, have little cheetah cat fights over a prime cut and even let the professional cheetah feeder pat them on the head. The tourists lap it up and it is almost impossible not to get clear, close up and impressive photos of animals that are usually allusive in the wild. It really was quite a spectacle. At 5pm when the sun isn’t so hot, I went on a game drive. For two hours we drive all over the farm and try and spot animals. I wouldn’t say the farm is teaming with wildlife, but we did see two giraffes, a couple of ostriches, eland, oryx, warthogs and lots of little animals. The other volunteer is from England and is teaching the local guides how be do a more professional job as wildlife guides. She is giving them lessons but doesn’t think they are putting much into practice. I’m going to spy for her and go on the game drives and take notes on their progress. She knows that if she is there “assessing their performance” they will put on a show but is doubtful that they are otherwise putting her lessons into action. They really do need to learn a lot about enthusiasm and how to interact with the guests. Of course there are cultural barriers where they don’t want some white person appearing out of nowhere and telling them what to do when they have been doing the same job for years and as long as they don’t get fired, they don’t see a problem. I start teaching at the kindergarten on Monday. I heard from Justina (who works in the kitchen) that the kids are very excited to have a teacher again. The last volunteer teacher left 3 weeks ago and there hasn’t been any school since. Part of my “additional project” is going to be writing a genealogy/ethnography of the local staff. They live in staff housing behind the main guest house. I think they will be a lot more fascinating that the hordes of fat Germans who come through here. I am really looking forward to working on that, but first I have to gain the trust of locals so they will talk to me. At the moment they seem a little stand-offish. I think working at the school with their children will be a good way of slowly gaining their trust. I’m also going to do an HR project with the staff. I’m going to get them to set some long term goals. Do they want to get further training? Do they want to move up to a different job? Do they want to go back to school? How can we make that happen for them? Once again I may find some cultural barriers. Maybe surviving and having a decent life is enough? Maybe they simply don’t share the ambitiousness of Americans? And surely there is nothing wrong with that. Maybe I’ll find that there are some hidden ambitions that I can help with. The owner, Johann, is really quite jolly and personable. I thought he was going to be a big of a curmudgeon, but I guess he just came across that way in e-mails. His family has been here since 1942 and his parents are buried in a beautiful cemetery near the river bed. He obviously wants the best for his employees and all their families who rely on him for their livelihood. He even set up the kindergarten for their children because the nearest school is too far away. It does all seem a little be feudal with the lord in the big stone house on the hill and his peasants in “employee housing” on the flat lands below. However, he has built them nice houses (as good as my stone hut), so I guess he is a benevolent feudal lord.

On the road

The security at the airport confiscated my Swiss army knife! I know, I shouldn’t have had it in my carry on, but I wasn’t thinking. Nowadays they are all obsessed with liquids and shoes. It wasn’t even the knife blade portion of the Swiss army knife they objected to. It was the cork screw blade. What happens now if I have a wine cork emergency and I don’t have my trusty tool? That could be disastrous!

The flight to Johannesburg seemed to go on for-

blinkin’-ever! I’ve now spent the last two nights trying to sleep on planes and I’m feeling a little fetid. I’m now sitting a Jo’burg airport. It’s rather impressive. They have obviously put a lot of work into preparing the airport for the World Cup. They are clearly obsessed - a bit like Sydney with the Olympics. It is in complete contrast with Banjul airport in The Gambia (bless it). They had maybe 3 flights a day and I had to literally wake up the customs agent in order to get through customs into the departure lounge. As he was screening my luggage he tried to convince me to marry him and become his second wife. Since that was the 200th marriage proposal I’d had in The Gambia, I didn’t take it too seriously. I must say, I’m not feeling out of place being white

I'm on my way

After much organizing and planning and plotting, I'm finally on my way. I catch a flight to South Africa tonight and then a connecting flight to Namibia (Windhoek). I leave at sundown Tuesday and should get to the lodge by sundown on Thursday. It makes Africa so much more enticing that it is so far away. But then again, so is Australia.

I'll post again as soon as I get my feet on the ground. I've been in touch with a friend of a friend in Namibia who has actually been to the lodge a couple of years ago. She has good things to say. Now I'll just have to find out for myself.

Sidetrack to Namibia

I'm moving the Ghanaian library project back a couple of months. I was going to travel in Ghana in September to check out the building and see what exactly is required to get the project moving. This is now schedule for mid-

January. In the meantime, I came across an opportunity to work at a eco Safari Guest House in Namibia for a couple of months. I couldn't resist. I will be teaching the staff and their children to speak better English and work on their customer service skills. I will also be helping with wildlife projects including tracking rhinos. I know this wasn't part of my plan, but something about it was calling me. I bought my ticket yesterday and will be gone from September 24 until mid-November. I will be updating this blog frequently as soon as I hit the road. I know, I know, this was meant to be a project blog, but I have nowhere else sensible to put my travel blog.

Re-inventing the wheel

I'm in New York for the summer, pottering around and doing some work on getting the project together.

During one of my marathon web researching sessions, I came across an organization called Books for Africa (www.

booksforafrica.org). They are basically a large scale version of what I had in mind. They gather donated books, sort them, box them up and send them to projects in Africa. I've been in touch with them and they have offered to ship me a freight container full of donated books as long as I fundraise the money for shipping. The container would contain approximately 22,000 books and the shipping cost is $9,500 (about 50c/book). They also gave me contact information for the Ghana Book Trust which is a governmental organization in Ghana that they ship books to already. They distribute the donated books from Books for Africa to library projects in Ghana. So it may be possible for me to just show up in Ghana, put a proposal to the Ghana Book Trust and simply go and collect the books. That would save me probably 80% of the work involved in putting together the library as there would be no running around collected donated books, no need to fundraise for shipping, no hanging out at docks, no haggling with West African customs officials, etc. etc. Also 22,000 books may be a bit excessive and they could start me off with a smaller batch. Now I am of two minds. On one hand this would make things surprising easy. On the other hand, it will take a lot of the challenge out of the project and I was rather looking forward to the challenge. I have had such a great response from people who want to get involved. A lot of people are unemployed right now and looking for a worthy cause in which to invest some of their energy. I don't know. I'll have to give this some thought. If anyone is reading this, I would love your feedback.

Sad news

I'm determined that this blog will not be a "personal blog", but rather an account of the project. However, some things that are going on in my life can't go without mention.

On May 17 I came home from a 5 day trip to Mexico and found my father dead in his apartment. He had been suffering from heart problems for several years so it wasn't unexpected, but it was still shocking. He had died alone.

He had been so sick and miserable for so long and his mind was definitely going. He had made peace with is own mortality and was ready to go. He had believed that he wouldn't live through the Winter, but he made it long enough to see the cherry blossoms in the Spring.

All his troubles are now over.

Logistics

In a fit of logistical brilliance, I realized that I needed to build the infrastructure over in Ghana before I started collecting and shipping books.

Then as fate would have it, I was laid off my "real" job. Yippeee!

!! Now I can dedicate myself full time to the project. I got back in touch with the the folks from the Salormey Volunteer Group in Ghana. They already have a library project that has been abandoned. There is a building, there are even a few books, but there is no-one to open the doors. This means I have a great starting point for my Box of Books project. Now that I have a lot of time on my hands, I am going to make a trip over to Ghana in late August to set up the infrastructure, get building started on the bigger library in Obo, and generally get the lay of the land. Once the infrastructure is in place, then I'll come back to the States for the book collection process. At least then I'll know exactly where things are going and how much can be accommodated. It's all very exciting. It feels like things are starting to come together.

Every journey starts with the first step

I'm very quietly starting to tell people about this website. I've already bored everyone I know (and everyone I've ever met while drunk at a party) with wild stories of my African library plans. Now is the time to start pulling things together.