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.