Uncertainty

I’ve been thinking a fair amount lately about what it means to be uncertain.  Anyone who has spent time ‘here’ knows that things often do not happen when we want them to, or when we think they are going to, or at the time for which they were planned.  And sometimes, even after all this time, I wonder why that is.  There are lots of practical reasons for that here in Maun.  I’d like to take a shower, but there’s no running water.  I’d like to buy some onions, but the government decided not to import them any more.  I’d like to make a phone call, but the network just crapped out again.  So it isn’t always easy to count on the basics that we often take for granted in the US, for one thing. 

It’s also more than that.

A few years ago, I was running errands in town with a very dear friend of mine.  Among other things, we were supposed to drop off some paperwork at an office where someone was waiting for us.  He called my friend’s cell phone.  She said we’d be right there, just five minutes.

The thing is, we were nowhere near arriving in five minutes.  She knew that.  I knew that.  And I could not for the life of me figure out why one would not just be honest and give a realistic answer.  Although perhaps the easy answer is that no one expects things to run on time here (or, as I told my students recently, “If something I plan happens within, say, an hour or two of when I say it’s going to happen, that is definitely on time.”).

But even more than the why, I wonder what uncertainty really means and why it matters whether things happen on the schedule or now.

It seems to me that certainty comes more from a feeling than a reality, from the notion that one ‘knows’ with some solidity what is happening and when and why and how.  I wonder about this, in part, because isn’t certainty also illusory?  How often have you been ‘sure’ about something that turned out not to be true, or quite true?  How many times have you invested in an idea or a person that led you into more gray than black or white?  I’m guessing, often.  Probably more often than most of us like to admit.

Which raises another question.  Why does it matter so much for us to be certain in the first place?

Sabbatical Finds Me in Maun

This year’s field school has already gone rushing by – three weeks of counting wildlife and discussions with community members and presentations by researchers.  And of course, some small incidents with the truck stuck in sand, and a disagreement over what constitutes a ‘souvenir’ at the border, but in each case no harm done.   One of our running jokes included keeping a virtual list of things that my students were not allowed to tell the university president on their return.  The last one I added after I dropped them off at the Zimbabwean border to catch a comby [shared minibus taxi] to Vic Falls for a few days after we finished up and before they went their separate ways; it was, uh, “Don’t tell Ron that the field school wound up beautifully with me dropping the students off at the…Zimbabwean border…so that they could catch a lift into Vic Falls…”


Now, with a year of sabbatical opening up in front of me, I’m settling in to Maun again – good friends, interesting research questions (mine and those of others), dust, power outages, new projects, inflated liquor taxes, Hilary’s pecan pie, rising river waters, strange looks at the white girl walking along the road instead of driving.  Not that I don’t have a car – I do.  But the view is different from the side of the road, and one thing I have always appreciated about living here is that, well, the view is different.


One of the things that I have been talking about with my current research student (who is doing an absolutely phenomenal job, by the way, and I say that not because he’s likely to read this but because I mean it most sincerely) is that most of doing research “somewhere else” is not about the questionnaires and surveys and interviews and formal processes known as data collection.  Most of it – if one truly wants to understand an unfamiliar place – is about relationships.  And building good relationships takes time.  A lot of time.  A lot of time doing things that seem, on the surface, unrelated to that research proposal that got you funded to get here in the first place.  Some excellent advice on this subject came from my dissertation advisor, who told me to be interested in everything – because one never knows what might become important later.  My own caveat to this is, be interested in the people around you – and what they are interested in, because while yes, it might help you with your research, most importantly – everyone is a human being and nobody wants to be treated like a patient at the dentist’s office [hold still while I yank what I want out of you!].


This philosophy has some funny consequences here.  In particular, when people ask me how the work is coming – like, how are the surveys, or interviews, or the data gathering they assume to a usual researcher’s task – I haven’t got much to say.   This is in part because, at some level, I’m not ‘doing’ a whole lot right now.  I’m spending a lot of time catching up with folks.  I’m reading.  I’ve been to a few meetings.  And I’ve initiated some discussions that are likely to evolve over the next year or more.  But with time and presence, in my experience, these are the kinds of things that mean much more – in human terms, as well as research parlance – than do quick ‘roadside surveys’ [a term used by a grad student I’ve worked with who is referring to the tendency of foreign researchers to cruise through rural areas interviewing whoever is closest to the road, rather than having to go into or, lord forbid, stay in villages].  There’s lots in the offing, I’d say.  But from the outside, it probably doesn't appear to be much right now.  As my best friend in high school used to joke, “People tell me I procrastinate too much.  And I say, just wait!!”


Admittedly, I am also taking some time to relax – to read things I want to read, watch some disappointing movies, see if I can sit in the sun long enough for my legs to take on the same tint as my arms, slow roast a pan of tomatoes and garlic and collect around town [which is actually possible now, craziness] the ingredients to make tiramisu for a party on Saturday.  This kind of space is also lovely for the settling in and out of ideas; with some love and deliberation, the itchy desire to write creeps back in – and here I am.


So among the many other things I’ve been thinking about lately, is nothing.  My Shambhalians will of course find that especially humorous.  But to quote Peter Gibbons, who did not get it right the first time but did well the second time around:  “I did nothing.  I did absolutely nothing.  And it was everything I thought it could be.”

familiarity

The afternoon was clear blue and just past warm, a bit more so than I associate with Botswana winters. The boat skimmed the surface of the Thamalakane River, and for the second year in a row I marveled at how much water there is in Maun. The house I lived in could only be reached by boat this time last year, prompting me to wonder what it would be like to sleep in a mokoro. The reeds teemed with heron, darters, and little bee eaters; lilies floated a path for the jacanas’ spidery legs, and tiny pied kingfishers hovered above the water, peering down for silvery slips of fish before diving and coming up (hopefully) wriggling.

Another small boat approached; I glanced over and saw some colleagues from the research center coming from further up river. “Hey Mike, Piotr,” I said, loudly, with a wave. My students burst out laughing.

“You KNOW them??” one of them asked, incredulous. There we were, kilometers up the river from Maun, in what must feel to them like the back of beyond, Africa, and I was greeting the guys in the next boat over like they were my neighbors. Of course, they used to be just that.

“You know EVERYBODY,” another commented. This, after spending 24 hours with me here in Maun, where I hadn’t gone more than a couple of hours without running into someone I know. I’d been greeted warmly that morning at my favorite local café by its owner, run into friends on the street, had someone in a Land Cruiser whip the vehicle to the roadside where I was walking to say hello, arranged a morning basket weaving course with probably the most lauded basket weaver in the country, and briefly introduced my students to the director of the research center where I used to work. In all of this, Maun is not unlike many small towns, continent aside. But to them, it might be another planet entirely – and seeing me so at home was unexpected.

I’ve spent months arranging and rearranging plans for this field school, my first foray into bringing students with me to Botswana and Namibia. But in the midst of all the doing and undoing, I found myself wondering what it would be that would impress itself upon my students most strongly, what would grasp their attention or capture their imaginations most powerfully. And in many ways now, it seems to me that what matters most is the personal. And as much as I’ve tried to make sure that they hear from many voices on this trip, much of what they understand is still filtered through my view. To some degree this is unavoidable – I do, of course, want them to understand certain things, and I’ve set this up to help them see what I think is most important. But I’ve realized that the ‘view’ is beyond that – that they are watching me, in speech and expression and deed, taking cues, raising questions, and comparing.

On our second full day, for example, we visited a campsite and cultural village that’s part of a local community conservation project. Walking outside of the reed fence around the small circle of huts, I saw some elephant dung. “Ah, mma,” I said to the assistant manager, Olly, who was guiding us around and telling us about everything from solar panels to hyena traps. “Are you having elephants here?”

About an hour later, we stopped at a craft shop selling baskets. An open Land Rover from a high-end safari company had already pulled up at the roadside, and a woman dressed in shades of khaki was seated on the front step next to a woman who was weaving. The tourist wanted a picture; the woman said not unless a purchase was made. Refusing to believe that a weaver was not part of her safari, the tourist laughed and took her photo anyway.

Back on the road, my students were clearly annoyed with the obnoxiousness of the tourist; they couldn’t believe that she didn’t listen when told not to take the woman’s picture or how insensitive and condescending she was. So we began to talk about how people talk to each other here. “You may have noticed that my speech pattern and grammar tend to be a bit different here,” I said. And they jumped on it. And indirectly, me.

“Yeah, you asked if they were having elephants there, which is incorrect, but she totally understood you,” one of them noted.

“But what’s different about the way I talked to Olly?” I asked. “Or, is anything different? Was I being condescending?”

They chewed this over a bit, as we rehashed our interaction with Olly. One of them had tried to ask her a question that she did not understand, and after a couple of tries I rephrased it. But did this mean that I did not respect her, that I thought she just was not smart enough to get it? I also asked if they had noted how nervous she seemed when I asked her to tell us about the campsite, until we talked for a few minutes. I spoke slowly and carefully, smiling, trying to put her at ease. And I think my students came to see that how I spoke was perhaps more important than what I said (although this may be a dangerous lesson to teach college students :-). They had clearly ‘read’ the tourist’s motives as selfish and thoughtless, but they could see I was trying to behave otherwise. Whether or not I succeed consistently is, of course, up for debate – but I have noticed that they are at least as curious about peoples’ stories and experiences as they are in getting answers to policy questions. This, I think, will serve them well.

the days are [still] just packed

So much for keeping up the blog in the last month! I could come up with all sorts of excuses, but – actually, that might be fun. How about:
There were lions in camp?
Too many buffaloes on the road?
The power went out for a really long time?
There was no power to go out for a really long time?
I’ve never seen that many sable at once before?
We got distracted by Chinatown between Kavimba and Kachikau?
I was generally far too busy (watching elephants, drinking wine, I mean, doing research)?
Well, most of these are at least a little bit true. I’ve driven well over 4000 kilometers in the last six weeks, looping up through the Caprivi and back down into Botswana. There has been plenty of the unexpected – a last minute trip to Seronga, for example, and some damage to the car (and my ego, but not the rest of me). Mostly I have been spending time with the folks I am fortunate to call friends and colleagues in this corner of the planet. I’ve gotten some great ideas and suggestions for the field school I am planning to run next year, and I’m looking forward to that in new and challenging ways. As for the rest, it feels a bit foolish to try to summarise it all. Suffice to say, I will be full of stories in my usual Grandpa Simpsonesque fashion (When I was in Swaziland in 1999, we had a dead wildebeest in the back of an open Land Rover, and while trying to drive through a river at sunset we hit the bank and got buried in the mud. Now, mind you…) upon my return and will be happy to share them, with or without the gin and tonics we make with lemon instead of lime here in the bush.

skeletal

There are plenty of things that are not easy to write about, but this one may be the toughest. When I first started coming here about 8 years ago, no one used the term “HIV” or “AIDS.” People would whisper, “She has TB [tuberculosis],” pronouncing TB with a deliberate slow emphasis punctuated with a certain stare-as-signal about what the speaker really meant. Today, discussions are much more open in many ways, but a heavy stigma remains – and even in many personal relationships, environments where sexual education is being done, and circles of people who talk an activist game in the abstract, the barriers sometimes remain too big to cross. It may have become easier to admit this ‘shame’ to a stranger, it seems, but perhaps not to those closest to you.

It is commonly taught in HIV education here that you can’t tell who has it by looking at them. But at the same time, there is a clearly identified set of indicators that people look for as others become sick. For me, each time I come back, I notice who has become skeletal. A few years ago, the appearance of one of the staff members from a conservancy in which I had worked shocked me. His height accented even more his skin-stretched-over-bones appearance and I nearly did not recognize him. But this time it has been especially hard. I met Samuel [not his real name – even though he’ll never read this, I know he wouldn’t want me to call him in this way] the first time I arrived in Katima. He was, perhaps not unlike me, round and smiling, admiring of my shape but not aggressive in his compliments, quick to laugh but also thoughtful. Over the years we have sat thru meetings together, walked around his village together, spoken of elephants and basket-weaving and fences and the militarized history of the area where he grew up (thanks to the South African Defence Force’s incursions into Angola from the Caprivi).

But Samuel is no longer fat. His khaki pants hung back, baggy and generous, when he leaned in to hug me the other day. The shape of his face has changed, sunken cheeks skimming jawbones and drawing in towards teeth rather than being padded with flesh. The crinkles in his face when he smiled were still there, but sharpened. When I raised the subject of finally doing a bit of fieldwork together that we have been talking about for some years now, he said, “Ah, but I am going on leave.” He spoke the words slowly, softly, not like someone looking forward to a holiday but simply someone in need of rest. And they made me sad.

I have not been able to figure out the constitution of this kind of shame. I have long argued that it does not make sense to have such a burdensome cultural stigma surrounding a disease transmitted by something everyone is doing – having sex, and with someone of the opposite sex. When the “gay cancer” first emerged in the US, there was at least some twisted logic in associating the virus with a behavior that was (unfortunately) not yet socially acceptable. The same is true for the emerging epidemic in countries like Russia, where it is associated with IV drug use – a small “outcast” section of the population. But here, it spreads thru heterosexual intercourse, and multiple partners (for men) remain an expression of masculinity. There are some pieces that contribute – like the role of Christianity in shaming talking about (and having) sex, but I don’t think that is enough.

I have thought at times that perhaps the distance between being exposed to the virus and contracting the disease remains too great to seem like an imminent threat. For the girls trying to earn money by sleeping with truck drivers passing thru between Zambia and South Africa, for example, the risk could feel remote compared to hunger or desperation for a stable place to live. In this way, telling people at health workshops and in doctor’s offices that “you can live a long time with HIV!” may have worked at cross purposes, turning into “I’ll deal with that if and when it happens.” And, at the same time, there is a basket of condoms by our office door here that needs constant replenishment. There is, at least, that – which would not have been possible a few years ago. More and more people here are getting access to ARVs, but even as the epidemic progresses, new ways of coping with shame emerge to contest the public space for open discussion that is fighting for ground. I’ve heard stories about those on treatment burying their pills and digging them up to take a handful only when no one else is around – which is, of course, a recipe for resistance. I’ve seen those who conduct workshops and counsel others who are completely unable to talk about their own losses or behavior – to confront the cheating husband, for example. And so I don’t know what it will take.

An epidemiologist friend of mine left South Africa some years ago now, despite loving the place – because, as he put it, “I don’t need to be here when people really start dying.” He, of course, had the choice – but the most affected do not. Is it possible for a situation to be getting better and worse at the same time? Because that’s what this has begun to feel like – at least, in a larger sense. In a more personal one, it’s become a matter of horrible wondering who might become the next skeleton.

it's better to sell than to steal [or not]

I like sports. I don’t follow soccer (or any other sport) fervently, or really at all, but I enjoy watching a good game. But I had not realized the extent of soccer fanaticism until I was in the middle of the World Cup in Joburg.

I became interested in soccer tourism when the transfrontier conservation areas in southern Africa created a brand specifically to market wildlife safaris to World Cup fans. Come for the soccer and stay for the safaris – or something like that. The brand is “Boundless Southern Africa” – an idealistic construction of grand, wild notions of untamed Africa – available at a park near your favorite soccer stadium! As plans for the Cup proceeded, the language around the ways in which South Africans would benefit grew more and more generous and was extended to surrounding countries. So I wanted to see if such promises would be realized – that is, who might profit, and who might struggle.

There are larger economic issues here – like, for example, the fact that the South African government’s bid book to FIFA (whom I am increasingly convinced is clearly some form of soccer mafia) claimed that the cost of upgrading stadiums would be about 1 billion rands. In the end it was more like 16.5 billion. Where *did* that money come from, in a country that includes in radio broadcasts announcements about which traffic lights are ‘out’ because of power shortages?

There are also small, less visible layers – and these tend to be the ones in which I am most interested. So I spent six days wandering around Joburg, walking around stadiums and malls and fan parks, stopping at intersections and chatting to guys selling flags and vuvuzelas to passing cars, and trying to get a feel for what the money trail might look like to the average street trader.

I forced myself to spend the better part of a day in Sandton, the northern suburb regarded as a hub of tourist hotels and “safety” – but also the temporary home of a group of women who were knitting (and teaching others to knit) stocking caps striped with the colors of the South African flag. I wanted to find and talk with them, which turned out to be a bit more of an adventure than I thought. Eventually I found them in rocking chairs on a patch of carpet in the middle of a mall hallway, selling caps for 120 rands, 50 of which went to the knitter. Not bad.

On the taxi ride back to where I had left my car, the issue was neatly summed up for me by my driver when I asked him if he thought people would benefit from having the World Cup here: “I think that those who already have money will make more money,” Musi stated, directly and without bitterness. He pointed out that government had been making efforts to clear the streets of informal traders because they wanted the place to “look nice” for tourists, adding that most of those who sell on the street are foreigners. This gave an ominous undertone to the street sweeping, as if those from abroad (who may or may not have legal papers) could be easily removed with the trash.

The Ellis Park Stadium is located just east of the city center, where I went on the day of the Argentina-Nigeria match. A 4pm start time meant that roads around the venue had been closed since 10am and there were police cars parks at every intersection, manned by at least 2 men (and an occasional woman) in uniform. As I walked closer to the stadium itself and found myself in the middle of a festive group of Argentines, I began seeing men selling vuvuzelas, flags, packets of cookies and nuts, and painting faces with stripes of national colors. I stopped to chat with a group of three young men wearing neon green t-shirts carrying black dufflebags full of earplugs. They were working for a registered company, but we talked about making money on the street. Chris, the most vocal of the three, told me that he didn’t think today’s match would yield much. “Even me, if I’m not working for this company, I would go home and sleep, you know, this area, Hillbrow, no one wants to come here, it’s dangerous, with gangs and even me, I don’t like it, the tourists won’t come.” The growing crown of Argentines seemed to conflict with his assessment, but he also talked about how difficult it was to get permission to sell on the street, with FIFA’s permitting requirements in concert with the City of Johannesburg restricting all commerce – especially, of course, regulation of FIFA-logo merchandise, but other items as well.

Just up the sidewalk from us, a policeman had taken interest in a man selling powder blue and white flags of various sizes. The cop began folding them up, as if to take them – which another policeman had told me was their policy, to confiscate and destroy. As the policeman circled, a man with a bag full of cookies and snacks next to us zipped the flap over them so they were not visible. And over the flags, there seemed to be some kind of slow negotiation going on; I was trying to watch intensely out of the corner of my eye. “You see? You see?” Chris interjected. “He’s just taken money, this one [the policeman], now he’s leaving him to sell.” And it was true – pocketing some rands led the cop to meander on his way, leaving the flags spread out on a bench. “But this, it’s too much, why can’t he let them sell?” Chris added. “Because how can people make money? If you can’t make money you have to steal. And it’s better to sell than to steal.”

The one way around this need for permits seemed to be face painting. Apparently, carrying around some small cups of color and a brush did not meet the standard of illegal commerce. “This, it’s just creative,” one policeman told me, “There’s nothing we can do about that.”
Soccer City – the tiled calabash-influenced stadium in Soweto that seats 90,000 people – was another story entirely. The stadium has the feel of being in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by highways and wills made of mine tailings and pools of water turned colors not found in nature by the seepage of minerals and chemicals over years of extraction. It’s also dusty. Very, very, dusty. I took a combi – a minibus taxi crammed with people – because there would not be a place to park. I couldn’t take the train without a ticket to the match. I couldn’t park in the park-and-ride-or-walk lots without a ticket to the match. And because I was going to leave when the game started, I couldn’t take the bus because, well, they don’t run until it’s over. Police were turning cars back from the main road probably at least 4-5km’s away from the stadium, and only let us thru because there was one lucky soul with a ticket in his hand sitting up front. There was also a man with a plastic bag full of blue vuvuzelas ready to sell, but that went unnoticed.

The result of Soccer City’s location is that there is literally nowhere to hide. We walked and walked and walked to get even to a parking area, then walked some more to reach the gated funnel-like paths beginning to fill with Dutch fans decked out in orange. And of course, cops. Everywhere, everywhere there were cops. Walking for two hours, I saw only 2 or 3 brave souls selling flags – and a few face-painters. But the fact that there is no semblance of daily life – flats, shops, restaurants – around Soccer City meant that not only was it hard to access, but it made everything and everyone stand out, in need of a clearly approved, appropriate role to play in the melee. Here, there was no room for selling without permits.

As the match crowd would up, we headed back to the main road to find another combi. But we had to walk even further back than where we’d been left off. By the time one showed up, crawled through the surrounding neighborhoods picking up passengers and parcels, got close to downtown, and suggested we transfer again, I wondered if I might not have walked faster. It took me nearly 3 hours to travel what is, as the crow flies, about 9 kilometers. And all without a match ticket.

I think it’s fair to say that Musi was right – the best indicator of benefit is existing privilege. This, while frustrating and disappointing, is not shocking. At the same time, I did appreciate the excitement for the Cup that was vibrating throughout the city. Flags adorned cars, vuvuzelas started honking at 6am, people were literally dancing and singing in parking lots and on sidewalks. The celebration seemed to transcend racial boundaries – doing the service, as one newspaper article pointed out, of forcing Afrikaner rugby fans to go to Soweto for a soccer match. Certainly there is something to be said for that. But in terms of material benefits, I’m afraid what can be said adds up to ‘not much.’

welcome to jozi

[an indulgent aside - these 'events' were nearly two weeks ago. i'll catch up, slowlyslowly]

Joburg has never been easy for me. While I maintain that it’s not as bad as the “murder capitol of the world” stories make it out to be, it is necessary to know your way around. I don’t. I never really did. I came and went a few times when I was living in the bush and it always made me a bit anxious. Having friends there helps, a place to stay, good conversation and an evening fire in the winter. So leaving the warmth of my second family in Windhoek and going to stay with old friends from my South Africa days did not seem so bad at the beginning of last week. I wanted to do a small project on the informal economy during the World Cup – go to the stadiums, walk around, see who was selling what on the streets, and find out if FIFA’s tight restrictions on licensing and marketing were as limiting in practice as they seemed on paper.

The edges of one AM are still blurry. Nina had been crying. I heard the alarm, an alarm, it woke me, but it seemed to be coming from somewhere else. I heard Tim get up and the noise stopped. Nina was crying. I was disoriented, the first night in another bed, tired. I think I heard the dogs’ claws clicking on the wooden floors. But I still don’t really know how to describe the noise Tim made next, a scream of sorts but so much louder, angrier, like a raging roar coming three times from the other side of the wall.

I bolted out of bed, grabbing for something warm, anything solid, opened my door, stumbling as my leg ached from being still. There was a man in the garden outside my window, Tim said, who had cut the electric fence, climbed over the wall, and was sitting in the corner hiding from the motion light over the driveway as it flicked on in his presence. Tim had only seen him when shining a flashlight out the window, just out of curiosity, even after he had shut off the alarm under the assumption that it was nothing. Nina was crying. Gail had scooped her up and taken her to their room, the panic button had been pressed, the security company called, and so we waited. We called again. The space around us seemed liquid, thickened with fear and uncertainty and frustration. I sat on Gail and Tim’s bed with Nina as they tried to figure out what was going on. “I’ll keep you safe, ok?” she kept saying to me, at three and a half years old, blonde and wide-eyed, talking of how we’d shoot the bad guys if they came back.

The man in the garden had fled back over the wall at the sound of Tim’s howl, breaking the water pipes in the process and leaving us without water. When the security guard finally arrived nearly fifteen minutes later, he parked his car in our driveway to watch – since the fence was not working and it would now be easy to get into the yard. “Do you want to crawl in bed with us?” Gail asked me.

Instead, I took one of the dogs back to bed with me. Shesha growled at the security guard’s car backing into the driveway just outside. And I got back into bed to wait for daylight, staring at the pale curtains hung over the window between me and the garden, watching every shadow of every tree branch, each leaf, leaving my glasses on so that I could tell the difference between a threatening shape and what shifted in the wind.

I’ve never been a particularly fearful person, which certainly does not mean I’m never afraid. It’s more that I am too stubborn to allow fear to stop me from doing the things I want to do. But the days after 1AM were animated by a flickering memory of what that kind of ‘afraid’ felt like that flared constantly – on the road when I took a wrong turn, when someone seemed to walk too closely behind me for too long, when I had to leave the car parked in an unfamiliar neighborhood, and when I shut off the light to labor at sleeping.

There are many things to say about what happened. This, it seems, is one of the hazards of living in Joburg. Everyone around me seemed to have a story that was far worse (comforting, and not) – because in our case, the system had basically worked. No one got in, we weren’t hurt, nothing was taken – except perhaps that false sense of security one gets from living in a fortress where the neighbors classify themselves as being under siege. Last month, some guys broke into the house across the street, shot the dog, and threatened the woman living there until her husband came home and “talked them out of it.” Friends of some friends had been tied up and held hostage in their home while being robbed. At a bar a few days later, even the edges of the flatscreen on which we caught the Ghana-Serbia match were being dusted for fingerprints as we watched after the previous night’s break-in.

This flies in the face of my claims that the only real concern for tourists coming to the World Cup was vuvuzela-induced deafness from the long plastic trumpet-like horns that South Africans blast with abandon at soccer matches. Johannesburgers (if that’s a word) are used to this kind of thing. It can’t be too big of a deal when it happens, because it happens often. Just, not to me. And at the same time, as I keep saying to a friend here, it’s all fine. Really. That *system* worked, such as it is. Maybe it’s more a problem of that “as it is” than anything else. It took a few days, but when my own fear began to settle, I thought about what it would feel like to be crouched outside someone’s window, waiting, perhaps looking to steal a radio from the car, but caught in a motion light, wondering if the [white] people inside had a gun. Horrible isn’t enough of a word.

Still, I admit, the next-to-last thing I wanted to do in the following days was suck it up and keep working by going to Hillbrow – a neighborhood considered intimidating even by many city residents – to walk around a soccer stadium looking for street trading which may or may not be legal. At the same time, the last thing I wanted to do was to feed my fear by deciding that I could not do what I wanted to do, that I would not be able to answer the questions I had or talk to people affected by the wave of soccer fans arriving at their doorstep.

So I went to Ellis Park, and to Soccer City anyway. And they deserve stories of their own…soon.

chameleons

One of the things that happens as soon as I land here is that my manner of speaking changes. By this, I mean that the cadence of my voice shifts, the words chosen are different, my speech pattern sounds altered (even in my own head). This is something about which some friends from the US have commented, when hearing me on the phone with African friends or actually being here. It’s not necessarily conscious but certainly habitual, sprinkled with a few Shona words that have become usual, and recalibrated to sound and feel more like those around me.

The content, however, also changes. As in any space, there are thing you say and things you do not. Sometimes, when the subject is difficult, we use hypothetical situations about other people as a replacement for what is actually happening to us. The other day, for example, a friend of mine was trying to figure out how to talk to a house guest about her tendency to come, stay, ask for rides, and eat without ever contributing to the household. It’s a touchy subject, to talk about generosity and hospitality without offense – especially in a place where my own experience is one in which the women I visit would generally rather give a guest their last sweet potato than save it for their own dinner. In the end, my friend decided to tell the guest a story about another person who was struggling with the same problem, about those who were coming and going “without even bringing so much as a loaf of bread!” It was not as hidden a tactic as it seemed, I thought, but anyway, it didn’t work.

This brings up questions for me about how it is we ‘know’ something about those around us, perhaps especially as researchers. We make claims of expertise based on having ‘been there,’ talked to people, perhaps stayed in the village for some days. But after ten years of coming and going, there are still subtleties of communication to which I am adjusting, tiny-spoken tidbits slipping out in a moment in front of the evening fire that completely change my interpretation of something I thought I’d understood. There are secrets, of course – like the fact that it took a dear friend of mine who works with HIV+ youth nearly two years to tell me that her brother had actually died of AIDS – but it’s more than that.

I can say this not only about others, but myself. It’s not only my voice that changes, but the way in which I inhabit space here. I respond mostly to “mainini” when called by “maiguru” – the little wife obeying the head wife; I cook and dish and serve dinner to the man of the house first; I bow and hold my right elbow in my left hand when I offer a plate. I do these things largely without thinking about them. And at last weekend’s kitchen party, I held my tongue in a roomful of women talking about ways in which a wife should serve her husband and reading the Bible as a reminder that the husband is the head of the household as God is the head of the church. But even as they nodded agreement, many of these women personify strength, independence, humor, and will. The lines that get so clearly drawn by outsiders about who is empowered and not fail to recognise much of the daily complexity constituted and reconstituted by the process of living out these personal relationships.

One of the things I have promised myself is that what I will respect most in doing my research is the people I encounter and with whom I am fortunate enough to spend time and share stories. This means that most of my time here is spent sitting and talking with people – not in interview form, but just passing time and discussing anything and everything from the floods to the garden to the last election. It is becoming clear to me that this approach is, in the view of many other academics, costly in a professional sense. In a male-dominated field, I spend time on things that “don’t matter,” resulting in me being shut out of some discussions and not respected for, say, spending time with women talking about craft markets rather than taking GPS points. A few years ago, I was giving a talk and in the process of introducing me, an older male colleague referred to me as a “relationship builder.” It was code for “someone who likes people” rather than “a serious scholar like me.” It felt rather pejorative, especially when after my presentation, he proceeded to reverse my interpretation of my own research – gleaned from weeks sitting with women in the Kalahari dust talking about how they cope with the risks of HIV in their sex lives and in caring for their sick family members. It was all that much more problematic because he was not being particularly argumentative – but rather, what was clearest was that he simply had not heard (or perhaps, listened to) much of what I had said.

I suppose there are things to be said about covering miles in others’ shoes and so forth; we all may appear different depending on the context – as well as who is in front, behind, or beside us. Perhaps the challenge is, whatever the appearance, to be open and genuine in the midst of that difference.

kitchen party

Every culture has its rites of passage – and of course, getting married is one of the most important. This past weekend, we hosted a “kitchen party” for the fiance of my sister’s husband (who is, in name at least, also my husband, but I suppose that would require more explanation than I’m prepared to give at this moment).

A kitchen party is a bit like a combination of a bridal shower and a bachelorette party. It is a celebration for a young woman who is getting married; she’s surrounded by other women – no men allowed, and no women below marrying age – who shower her with gifts. Most of the presents are, of course, for the kitchen, and the giver instructs the bride-to-be in the use of each gift. But they also give her advice about being married, how to treat her husband, difficulties that they may encounter, wifely ‘duties’, and so forth.

So by 3pm on Sunday, we had a houseful of joyful women – mostly Zimbabweans, but also Namibian and Zambian friends – waiting to celebrate with and advise Marylyn on her upcoming nuptials. Yes, I was the only white woman present. And no, it wasn’t awkward. Our husband’s sister was the mistress of ceremonies – and I can’t think of how to describe her other than to say that she is positively hilarious in any language. When I met her and she was informed that I am second wife to her brother, she made me kneel in front of her and take her hand, head bowed, showing deference as she is my auntie. We laughed. But this was not nearly so funny as her later leading performance of songs about sex, acted out with a single finger wagging straight out at pelvis level to remind us all of what “the thing” was all about.

I am not really supposed to say too much about the advice given and the songs sung and the topics of, uh, discussion (and laughter) that arose. But let’s just say that while most gifts were for cooking, Daisy and I had chosen to give the bride-to-be a set of towels and rugs for the bathroom. You would not think that towels could lead to a crass and giggling enactment about luring one’s husband into bed, but they did. And we were in an uproar. I was never so glad to have bought bath sheets.

catching up in windhoek

Saying that Daisy is my sister is not something I say in the usual African way of referring to women around my age as sisi. It means that what I feel for her is familial - and it’s all that much more so, for me, because I don’t always understand her, because we do disagree at times, because we each make decisions that the other finds incomprehensible.

The other night we were watching CNN. Anderson Cooper was reporting on a study about children’s perceptions of race that the network had commissioned. Not shockingly, as has been found countless times before, children react to skin color early and often – and even when they are black, tend to prefer pictures of children who are lighter-skinned. The white kids are thought to be smarter, prettier, and better behaved; those with darker skin tones are mean, unliked, and stupid.

When I first met Daisy some eight years ago now, she was distant. Polite, but measured. She hesitated about me - not in a manner demonstrative of a lack of confidence or fear, but from a place of grounded experience that showed it was likely there might be something about me to keep at arm’s length. I chose not to attribute this to anything at first. But in time the cause worked its way out.

One night at a conference in Vic Falls some years ago, we were sitting at the bar. As the only two women in the group that had come from Namibia, we were sharing a hotel room. Well, it was really more like a little house unto itself, with multiple bedrooms, a kitchen, and a sitting room where the Chief joined us late in the evening and rather unexpectedly. But that’s another story entirely.

Most of the conference participants had gone back to their rooms. But Daisy and I sat talking with the bartender, and out of nowhere, the Chief joined us. We kept him lubricated with J&B until we found out he had never had a Springbok – a shot of half Amarula and half crème de menthe layered in a glass to show the line between the emerald shade of the mint and the creamy tan of the Amarula. We ordered three and drank. The conversation wandered into talking about white people. Maybe it was the contrast of the liquors that did it, both on the bar and in our blood. Daisy pressed her forearm up against mine. About racism, she knew, she said, speaking with the certainty of growing up black in Rhodesia. “But this difference,” she continued, putting a finger on her arm, then mine, then hers again, “I don’t see it.”

I have thought about this conversation many times over the years, thought about it as a crossing point for me, a moment in which it became possible for me to both be a white person and talk about them with the detached annoyance of familiarity. I looked no different. But my view was changed. Daisy had taught me something, and the lesson continued as we watched CNN’s report on perceptions of race. She began speaking of Takudzwa, our niece, who is turning five in August. Takudzwa knows me as Auntie Rachel; the first time we all spent time together in the village she was shy and hid behind her mother Aggie’s skirts most of the time, peeking at me – but beginning to do so playfully by the time we left. When I stayed with Aggie, her husband Gilbert, their son Tanaka, and of course, Takudzwa, in their tiny concrete house in the townships of Harare, Takudzwa would come running to me for sanctuary when she cried, if Tanaka was teasing her or refusing to hand over a toy. She sees me without fear or hesitation.

“You know, for Takudzwa, white people are not the same as they were for me,” Daisy said, turning away from the TV to look at me. “For her, she has grown up with you, seen you in the village, slept in the same room with you, washed in the same shower as you, peed in the same toilet as you. You are the same to her. When I was growing up, when we would go to Harare, we would see white people – but we could not even sit where they could sit, or eat, or go to the toilet where they did. Everything was apart.”

I have, in my office, the emblematic picture of a white woman doing fieldwork in rural Africa, squatting amongst adorable little African children in a schoolyard, dresses and t-shirts dirty, my gaze on the camera and theirs on me. I am often careful to talk about how this was hardly the first time any of them had seen a white person, as seems to be a claim to originality that whites like to make. In this light, then, perhaps it is not so much the experience of being around that matters – but the experience of being with.

This morning, after I typed up a program for this afternoon's party, Daisy thanked me in Afrikaans. "Dankie," she said, in that slightly teasing tone she reserves for facetious moments.

"You're just saying that because I'm white," I replied, straight-faced. Then she and I and the rest of our houseful of Zimbabweans burst out laughing.

forty giraffes walk into a bar, i mean, chobe national park...

let the beg-a-thon begin

This morning, like so many before it and so many more to come, was supposed to be simple. Gilbert was going to wash the car, then I’d drive it to the hospital and leave it with Grita so she could show it to the people interested in buying it and I’d walk back to the office. No problem. Oh, so little I have learned after all.

The phone rang at 8:30. “Rachel, when are you coming? This guy is here, I thought you should talk to him,” Janet said. Yeah, within an hour, I said, I’m coming. I knew the car wasn’t ready yet and I thought an hour was especially generous.

10:18, the phone rang again, Janet again. Yeah, I’m coming now, I promised. Twenty minutes later, I tried to start the engine. Nothing. Lights on, a little cough, nothing. I had said something to Oliver about the petrol light being on yesterday, but he assured me that he had ‘calculated’ everything and it was fine. In my defense, I did laugh at ‘calculated’ even then. But I’d made it home after dropping him at the bus, and after all, I only needed to get back to the hospital – not more than a mile away. Gilbert and Tonde tried the ‘push-to-start’ technique. Nothing. I suspect we are out of gas, I said.

Now, I’m pissed. I’m late, and my time is being eaten by something that could easily have been prevented. I only have five working days here, I thought, stomping angrily through the dust on my way to the office, and this shit is wasting my time. I couldn’t even find Janet’s phone number to call her to take her up on sending someone to pick me.

I passed Patricia on the way in, her back turned – and I didn’t greet her, committing a sin of sins. Janet saw the dark cloud over me when I walked into her office. “You are not ok!” she said. “Yes, I am, it’s fine, I’m just sorry that I’m so late, it’s rude, and I’m sorry,” I said. She brushed it off. Time is, after all, relative.

I suppose I was irritated already by more than my tardiness. See, I knew who she wanted me to meet, and I knew what it was about, and I knew I wasn’t going to have anything good to say. Some of the residents of one of the conservancy areas where I work have written a proposal to establish the Kingfisher Youth Center. They have identified 200 orphans (in an area with a population of 4100, mind you) and want to find ways to serve them, teach them sports, do HIV-AIDS education, and lots of other good things. So a small group of people got together and found the money for a building, which is nearing completion. I can’t tell you how remarkable this amount of initiative is, given the circumstances. They got land from the chief and have already built a structure.

“Janet, I’m happy to talk to him,” I said, trying not to let my frustration overwhelm my words, “but here’s the thing. He’s going to think I will get money for them. I know he won’t exactly ask, I know I won’t promise, but meeting with me, I’m a white American, and trust me, this is what always happens. He’s going to think that because I say I will try to help, that I will give them money. And I know that people think I must be rich, but I’m not. And then he will be disappointed if I don’t come up with something.”

I could hear the self-absorption seeping through my words, the pettiness, the whining of ‘why me,’ the loaded assumptions. And yet I said them all anyway. I do, and don’t, know better.

Brilliant, the man I was supposed to meet, came quietly down the hall shortly after my childish arrival. He smiled cautiously and held out his hand, extended from a lanky body which he seemed to be trying to make smaller in my presence. I can’t stand that kind of deference. Yesterday a man old enough to be my father asked me for something on his KNEES. First, get up, please, I said, taking his elbow and pulling. Then I gave it to him.

Brilliant was prepared. He gave me a copy of their proposal, an architect’s drawing of the building they are finishing, a list of 200 names (100 girls, 100 boys) of orphans in their area down to date of birth, and a letter asking for any kind of support. I told him I’d already emailed a friend of mine working in sports administration to see if she could help us get some equipment for them. And then I did the ‘lowering expectations’ dance:

“Now, Brilliant, I think what you are doing is wonderful, and very important, and I am going to TRY to help you. I can’t promise anything, but I am trying to find some sports equipment for you. Maybe we can also find a grant for you or something, I will ask around and see, and if you need something to be written I can help with that also. But please, I can’t say for sure, I can’t promise anything, so please know that I am trying but I don’t know if I can help you.”

He was very gracious and nodded, said he understood, and made sure I had his cell number and email address. Talking to Janet would be the same as him, he said, smiling. And then he left.

And frankly, I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed by my attitude, by my approach to the whole situation, by displaying my flaws so openly. All of my egalitarian notions were just tossed onto the scrap heap. He came to me asking for help. And I treated him like someone who was begging, and needed to be reminded of the other’s superiority.

Because of course, I CAN help. I do in fact have the ability to do something. They have built a center out of nothing and are now going round to see if they can make it into something more. And I have the gall to sit here and say, I’m not rich, I can’t do anything. There is some measure of explanation in all my excuses, but in the end, they aren’t enough.

So, I now do something that I hate. I’m going to ask you all for money. If half of you reading this could help me chip in, we could finish the building and get some equipment and food for the kids. Everything will go straight into the project – no irritating overhead or organizational fees. I owe it to these guys. Not because I’m a jerk and need to make myself feel better (which are fair enough), but because being here has changed my view of the world and offered me lessons that may take the rest of my life to really learn properly. And that is something you can’t say every day.

If you can help even a little – send it on to my mom, and she will get it to me:Marcia DeMotts
185 Bear Lake Circle
Divide, CO 80814

Once I’m in Maun, I will have Brilliant’s documents scanned and post them so you can see how far they have already come. Kingfisher needs it more than NPR, I promise you.

back in the caprivi

I never really know what I’m getting into when I arrive in Katima. Which, I imagine, is one of the things I love about it. My sister is no longer here, so my 18 hour bus ride was full of something less than delicious anticipation. After several hours of delays in Windhoek – begun by a half hour drive that should have taken 5 minutes to get us back to the garage to fix the bus that should have been fully operational BEFORE departure – it was a long slow night on a two lane road frought with donkeys and goats and miscellaneous other creatures that don’t really belong on a tarred highway. But my other sister met me on arrival, and we cruised over to the house – which was of course already occupied by other Zimbabweans. I thought I was heading to some quiet time on my own, but as usual, I was wrong. It still makes me giggle, this constant screwing up of mine. In end, if we all relegated our expectations to the existential scrap heap, I suspect we’d manage to be much happier anyway.

At the house we found my sister’s sister-in-law, who returned from Zimbabwe today on her way back to Rundu (yes, Jen, think of Rundu and laugh…!). With her was a friend who had hitched a ride. So they hung out, ran some errands around town, and came back just as I caved and decided to have a nap. Unfortunately, since the house has been mostly empty for a week, we were a little low on supplies. This meant we were ‘reduced’ to sorghum porridge rather than sadza (corn porridge) for dinner. I’ll skip the culinary lecture for now, but suffice to say, this was not nearly so big a deal to me as to them. As we were preparing dinner, there was a crashing bounce of a noise on the tin roof. I looked up. We went outside. Turns out, having locked the gate, we were somewhat immune to hearing the truck that had pulled up outside with a delivery. So the driver chucked something which remains unidentified at the roof and managed to get our attention.

Now this is where it gets interesting. Two Zimbabwean guys who remain unnamed brought two burgeoning burlap sacks to the doorstep, deposited them, and buggered off. My sister-in-law was quite pleased. I thought perhaps they were mealies (corn). But as she grabbed a knife and sliced thru the twine cords holding the bags shut, I quickly realized my error.

See, Katima is a border town – full of Zambians and Zimbabweans both legal and illegal. This means that, well, there is a lot of legal and illegal more generally going on most of the time, and it is well-camouflaged. The lumpy bags held leather handbags, canvas shoes, safari shirts, khaki pants, tablecloths, pillowcases, and other things made in Zimbabwe to be sold here. But they were far from legal entry. Vehicles coming in from Zimbabwe are subject to exceptional levels of scrutiny to which I can attest, having been a passenger in overburdened cars in both directions more than once. So there is no way that customs in Botswana, and then in Namibia, would have let this much stuff through.

Of course, I couldn’t resist. “Come on, sisi, who am I going to tell?” I pleaded, several times, seeking for an explanation. But she would not tell me how these bags had made it to our doorstep. I don’t blame her. But perhaps the strangest part was, despite the fact that it was already getting late and we’d set out beds for the night – once the goods arrived, they were off. Jamming purses and shirts and shoes into the truck of a rumbly, fringe-dashboarded Toyota, they were off. Promising to text me on past-midnight arrival in Rundu, she backed the car up to the gate, I let her out, and they were gone. I poured another gin and tonic and sat outside with the Southern Cross far above me, listening to the pumping music of Saturday night just up and around the corner.

eight years and a long walk

The office seemed further from the center of town than I remembered, and I thought, I’ll be late – how very African of me. But I managed to arrive just barely on time. “Fifth,” the security guard replied to my question of which floor would lead me to WWF. I couldn’t remember that either. I rode up, and was buzzed in – from there, it was just the same. I sat for a few minutes while he finished his phone call and then his secretary beckoned, saying, “You can come.” Walking into Chris’ office was like a step back in time. He strode out from behind his desk, smiling, greeting me, “Rachel! How nice it is to see you!” and wrapped his arms around my shoulders in the warmth of familiar. “Come, sit, can we get you some coffee or tea?”

We pulled chairs up at his small round table set for chats just like this one. She brought tea. Rooibos, black, bush tea – just like I’d asked – with a flash of a conspiratorial grin that despite my skin I didn’t want coffee and sugar and milk. The panda on the mug seemed to appreciate me, as did Chris. We talked about things, my life in the US, my mortgage and ‘real job’, the latest transfrontier park here that is stalled, what he’s up to, what I am trying to be up to. We talked about collaborating on a human-wildlife conflict project, which is increasingly a focus for me and it turns out, for him as well. And the crinkling around his eyes radiated appreciation for me, and inside, I thought, this is where I want to be.

See, the thing about Chris is, he’s the one who got me started in this place. Eight years ago, when I first packed a backpack and flew over to Namibia to meander for the summer, he was here – in this same job, in the same office, even wearing a similar sweater. He’d agreed to see me and talk about what WWF was up to in the Caprivi, which was – via online reports – what I thought I was interested in. And it turns out I was right. But in seeing me even then – a budding idiot of a graduate student – so was he. I was worth his time. Two years later, when I was getting serious, he set me up with IRDNC, and I have been working with them ever since. And not only this, but IRDNC has given me my family here. My sister was working for them at the time, but I didn’t know it. Three months of glasses of wine and laughter later, I had a new home. And in many respects, I owe it to Chris.

A knock at his door brought another American, a man working for the Nature Conservancy in Denver who’d been passing through but was on his way back to the US. Chris introduced us, and we all chatted briefly. Making a few ironic comments about working in Namibia, Chris cued me, and I chimed in. “These are the thoughts of an old hand,” he said to Matt, grinning at me, giving me a bit of respect I was never so sure I’d have. “Rachel started coming here way back when, and now, hey, she’s a big fancy professor in Massachusetts, and she’s still coming back.” Time slowed around us, for me, and I realized, he’s proud of me. I get it. I get credit for getting it. And while I know this is problematic, while I know there are things I will never really ‘get’, I allowed myself a moment of pleasure. I have earned a measure of respect. There are places here in which I no longer have to introduce myself. And that means something. What, exactly, I suspect I will always struggle to define. But that is part of the process – and apparently, so am I.

Putting away my notebook and getting ready to leave, we reiterated the possibilities for collaboration in the years ahead. “Because, you know, I don’t just want to drop in and out looking at things I think are interesting,” I told Chris. “I want to be useful, to examine projects and information in ways that will contribute.” He smiled again, nodding. “I know you want to make things better here,” he replied.

Riding down the elevator, I thought, problems and all – maybe there is no higher compliment.

goin' up the country

Until this past week, I had not spent much time in the southern part of Namibia. Let me rephrase. Apart from driving thru it in the middle of the night on an insane non-stop drive from Maun to Cape Town, I have not spent ANY time in southern Namibia. So being on the road during the daytime was refreshing if for no other reason than the fact that I could see more than the tar ahead and the swishing of dry grass to either side.

Mariental and Keetmanshoop both still feel like Afrikaner havens from the rest of the world. Wandering around looking for a place to buy bread, I felt lost in a rural African version of an old Western just before showdown – everyone was clearing off the streets (slowly), or sitting around waiting for something to happen (slowly), or turning their heads to stare when I walked by (slowly). Mariental especially is bleached, pale under even the somewhat gentler winter sun, and dry, dusty-dry like dirt that has never known water. Keetmans features several rock-hewn churches with corrugated tin spires, from either German colonial days or possibly even built stone-by-stone by Afrikaners migrating north from the Cape years before. But both are steeped in a feeling of thick isolation that buffers a sense of slipping through a crack in the face of time.

What was I doing there? This would be the logical question. My sister has started a new job – overseeing a project of the Namibian National Farmers Union to reduce poverty in the south through teaching people how to grow hoodia. Hoodia is a succulent – it looks like a cactified octopus – that when eaten, suppresses the appetite. The Nama, one of the ethnic groups here that historically has lived in the desert – apparently discovered that they could eat some of the plant and go days without feeling hungry. This has recently been turned into a desire to create a market for the next herbal weight loss craze. The project’s ‘beneficiaries’ each receive 15 plants that are already 2-3 years old. They will put them in sand and leave them for about a year before harvesting and drying them.

There are a lot of things about this project, already, that feel like so many others I have seen before. Our interactions with one of the local staff members found him more interested in getting me to go out drinking with him than in seeing the plant nurseries. One of the local governors is trying to hijack the ‘beneficiary selection process’ from the traditional authorities so that he can place the plants with people he wants to benefit. And there is only about a year to find and develop a market so that the growers can continue to plant seedlings after harvest next year and sell their products. We also found out that you can’t even harvest the plant properly without a stainless steel blade that costs a small fortune. This, to me would seem to be a pretty big sticking point – you can plant it, but you can’t take it out of the ground without a special piece of equipment that you will never own? Hmmm…

Anyway, I’m headed out to the bush tonight – up to Katima, where I have been working for the past six years or so now. I’ll be there a week or so before heading back to Botswana…ah, Maun, to days at the research centre and nights at Audi or the Sports Bar…

enough already

all right, i get it, more than a few of you have given me a hard time about not keeping up the blog. i guess it hadn't occurred to me to write from lowell, though what with almost getting fired, having my windows shot at, and getting to know the new neighborhood's resident yay-hoos, i probably could have found enough material. BUT, i am back in afrikaaaa for a few months, so i will do my level best to keep all y'all apprised in this way. i am starting off in windhoek, the capital of namibia, where my zimbabwean sister has just started a new job. we aren't really sure what it's about yet, but it seems exciting. next week we'll be off to visit some farmers around mariental who are part of her project, so let's hope i have a better idea what i'm talking about after that. otherwise, the next three months look to be a whirlwind tour of my old haunts - katima, kasane, maun, joburg, and maputo, presumably with a few good stories along the way.

leaving

“Koko,” I thought I heard coming from outside. Huh? I looked at the clock. 6:42 am. Seriously?

Everything in the house has been sold, and the small voice outside was coming round to pick the last of it. The concrete walls echoed as I stumbled out of bed – not that I’d been asleep for some time, but lying in bed was an act of optimism seeking a few more minutes of rest.

I folded up my sleeping bag and she collected my bed, extracting it from piles of luggage and a few things yet to be wrapped and shipped. The truck left, and I finished pulling things together. I showered by draining a bottle over my head, as our water was out yet again. Appropriate for my last morning, somehow.

I don’t much care for the house I’ve lived in these past 14 months, but this morning it was hard to leave. I felt pulled back, longing for something that’s already gone. It’s the end of an era, my housemate said a few days ago. I suppose he’s right.

So in a few hours I get on a plane, flying to Zimbabwe for my sister’s wedding. It’s a perfect ending for my time here. But flying straight on to a new life in Boston next Wednesday is still a little daunting.

Finally moving towards the car, I stopped in the dust and called to the remaining cat. Crazy, we call him. Crazy was here before us and will be here for some time after we’re gone. Crazy doesn’t really get along well with other living creatures, but I called out anyway. Lying in the sun, he squinted at me. Meowed. I called again. And he turned his head away.

seronga

The ferry closed at six, we thought. So roaring along the narrow waves of aging asphalt was the logical solution for our already-a-day-behind departure. Unfortunately, a few of Botswana’s finest were also out…on the side of the road…in chairs with clipboards and a radar gun. I suppose I should have just kept driving; after all, a cop flailing his arms to make cars stop seems a bit embarrassing for all of us. But my Midwestern follow-the-rules upbringing reared its reliable head, and I pulled over.

107 in a 60kph zone! Though I honestly can’t recall seeing a sign, and the village in which we were stopped had apparently receded from the road. I was traveling with a colleague, who did his level best to weasel me out of the fine. I’ve never given a bribe in Botswana, he said later, and neither have I. But the process of paying up was painful too; multiple forms attested to my admission of guilt, I signed over THE ACCUSED, had to wait for a receipt. In the meantime, other trucks flashed by at 110, 120k’s. “Ah!” shouted the receipt-writing cop to his younger, grave-faced partner. “You didn’t even tell me that one was coming!” as he missed shooting another one with the radar gun. Nice, I thought. I feel kind of like I’m doing a public service, keeping them occupied while everyone else hurls towards their destinations. Maybe they’ll take up a collection for me in appreciation.

We climbed back up into the Land Rover, my colleague taking the keys away from me as we discussed whether to haul ass or give up on getting to Shakawe before the river crossing was closed for the night. I think we can make it, I said, though of course I had never been up this way and had no idea. Predictably, perhaps, we pulled up at the dock as the ferry slid out onto the river. But the sign – this time, there was one – said closing time was 6:30. So we lucked out, and shortly, watched the sun set over the water, and drove onto gravel on the other side. Now, I’m unwound, I thought, as the first breaths of relaxation swirled from my lungs through my fingers and toes.

We arrived in the village several hours later, driving through thick dark and low hum of the occasional generator. There’s no electricity on this side of the river, and winter evenings set early and cold. Fishtailing through the sand tracks from the heart of the village – anchored by a bar and a bakery – we arrived at the house of the local councilor and his wife.

At this point, it seems wise to say that there is no way I’m going to be able to do justice to this trip here. Between the characters I met, moments that I savored, and things that made me want to scream, there was a lot of, well, drama. And as I sort through everything that has happened this past year while getting ready to leave, I find myself less resilient than usual, much more likely to be happily buzzed or completely dragging with little in between. So Seronga inflamed this tendency, being out in the middle of nowhere, getting to know the local conservationist scene, exploring the landscape, trying to talk with expats, villagers, government officers, missionaries. In the end, there is nothing like walking on so much Kalahari sand to keep you off balance.

ready, not ready...

After another hectic month on the road, I arrived in Maun this past weekend. I hesitate to say that I got home, because, well, I am perpetually confused about where home is, and besides, that last time I called Maun home, my Zimbabwean sister yelled at me because my home is supposed to be where hers is.

Anyway, I stood in my room, staring into my closet, looking at the clothes hanging there, and I thought, I’m not ready to go. As crazy as I feel here a lot of the time, I love it. I love that I am never bored and that there is something to learn every day. I love being stretched and challenged and reminded that my view of the world is not the only one. I love the simplicity, the way in which a less complicated day to day existence helps clarify why I do the things I do. And I love the fact that looking in the mirror here becomes an act of honesty rather than an examination of which mask I’m wearing today.

But at the same time, I am definitely ready to go back. I have a fantastic job waiting for me, a brand new loft almost ready to be lived in, family and friends that I miss. And some of the things upon which I have to spend energy here are, well, a present stream of frustration that ebbs and flows depending on how much I need from university bureaucracy. Right now the flow is pretty high, and so my patience has been worn low. So I do look forward to some of the simplicities of modern life as well.

But I know that when I arrive, I’m going feel displaced. Chosen or not, wanted or not, I will be unsure of where my feet are planted. In Afrikaans, the word for this is soutpiel. It literally means, well, salty penis. But metaphorically, it refers to a man with one foot in the West (especially Europe) and the other in Africa – so something is left dangling in the ocean. It’s an insult, an indictment of a lack of commitment to one or the other. Apart from lacking the requisite anatomy to fit the description precisely, I think I understand how this feels. I haven’t been able to make the commitment to stay here, or in the US. I know that going back will be eased by the idea that I will be in and out of Africa for a long time, which seems like the best of both worlds. But I often think I should have decided to stay here, difficult or not, the other side of the world or not. I feel a bit like, as Peter Godwin says, I am leaving my post.

The problem is, as I’ve said before, I want to be a full participant. If I am really to be here, I want both feet on the ground. I want to be a member of the community in which I live, and not just the white expat community (eesh). But this is hard, if not impossible. There will always be barriers, things I don’t understand, cultural discourses which I may come to understand but never just sink into. And as a white foreigner, there is a lingering feeling that at any time, someone could pull the carpet out from under me.

I imagine I might say some of these same things about the US, but for slightly different reasons. There, I think I do get it – I just don’t agree with most of it. I feel marginal in a different way. Maybe the difference is making the choice for myself about where and in what ways I feel I can do the most good…and be healthy and happy while doing it. But as always, I reserve the right to change my mind. And there are few things more American than that.

breaking and entering

I got my first SMS with the word ‘burglars’ in it the other day. Unfortunately, it was used in reference to some folks who stopped by my house on Sunday night. Fortunately, no one was home at the time but the cat (and I think she’s still a little freaked out). One of the two wooden doors through which you can get into our place was hacked apart with a panga (not to be overly dramatic, but it’s a large machete-type knife) and an undetermined number of ‘burglars’ crawled in thru what was left of the door and started going through our stuff. They didn’t find much. This is of course because we don’t have much. They riffled through everything in the cabinet under the TV, and went thru my housemate’s closet, and made a mess. But it doesn’t appear that they managed to take a whole lot of anything. They left a laptop, for example, but took a pair of tennis shoes. I think what happened was that a friend of mine, who was staying in the house while my housemate and I were away, drove up not too long after they got in and the sight of her headlights scared them off.

The reason they got in, though, was because my friend didn’t lock the metal gate over the outside of the wooden door. This is both disturbing and reassuring – the latter because it indicates that the place is otherwise hard to get into, but the former because it makes it feel like someone was watching for an opportunity, and/or hanging around a lot. The house was broken into several times last year before I arrived, but not since. The weirdest part of this one was that my room was completely untouched. There was a camera on the shelf in my closet, jewelry in the drawer next to the bed, shoes, clothes, a few CDs. But it appears they never even went into my room. It looks like someone ripped a small hold in the cardboard that covers up the broken glass in one of my windows and pulled out a small blue nylon bag with a few CDs in it, but even that they left in my housemate’s room down the hall.

On finding the door hacked open, my friend called the local 911. This is where the story gets strange. The Maun police are not known for being terribly responsive or competent. So the local expat community – read, whites – have established their own little group of enforcers. To ‘subscribe’, you just get a walkie-talkie. To get help, you use it to say someone’s in your house. Et voila, the cavalry arrives. In this case, my friend says, within a minute or two three men showed up at our place, one screaming “YOU BASTARDS!!!!” and going through the house with a handgun tucked into the front of his pants and wielding a shotgun with a flashlight taped to it. This image makes me almost as uncomfortable as the idea of someone breaking in in the first place.

Maun used to be a village. Now it’s teeming with tourists, who have enabled walls to be built between the wealth they bring and the people who resided in the area ‘before.’ This breeds resentment. It feeds anger and frustration. White foreigners come in and set up businesses for other white foreigners, constructing turquoise pools under razor wire walls and driving air-conditioned Land Cruisers past mud-and thatch huts while hobbled donkeys limp and graze in the center of town. And yet, we are the ones who feel affronted. We are the ones who arm ourselves and express our rage that THEY would try to take something from us. The first time my housemate was robbed – before I arrived – the thief took milk from the pantry. Someone broke into the house and stole MILK. Not the laptop that was sitting on the sofa, but MILK.

Even though she left the gate unlocked, my friend says she doesn’t think it’s her fault that ‘they’ broke in. By this I think she means that she shouldn’t have to lock the door. Fair enough. In an ideal world, no one would ever have to lock anything. But I can’t sort out the logic that inflates the bubble of the white community in Maun. People come here, a friend of mine says, because they can do whatever they want. Hearing stories about pilots ramming around in the Delta and overturning boats in the middle of the night, I suspect there is a great deal of truth in his observation. But I want to go one step further. I think it’s because we think we have a RIGHT to do whatever we want, and with no responsibility to anyone but ourselves.

In the end, having someone break into your house is scary – regardless of whether you are there or not, and regardless of the larger political context in which it takes place. Stuff is just stuff. My friend can go out and buy a new pair of shoes. But I can’t just go out and pick up a new sense of security. The 911 subscribers say that crime has really been escalating of late, and I guess they would know. As for me, I think Maun is built on inequalities which have real consequences for everyone – whether they admit it or not. Maybe taking so freely isn’t free in the end, and maybe privilege can’t help you sleep at night. I guess I’ll be testing that one out in the days ahead.