Tag Archives: Namibia

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Planting Seeds

I enjoy writing though I’m not very good at it. My spelling is horrible. My sentence constructions can be bested my many 10 year olds, and my grammar hasn’t improved since junior high school. Yet I continue. Becoming a writer is what I dreamt of becoming when I was a kid. I’ve yet to realize that dream. It doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try.

Kids dream of all sorts of things they’d be when they become adults. While in Namibia, I had put together a series of lectures I would present to secondary and high school kids that exposed them to things I thought they just would not see otherwise. The lecture series was my way of addressing what I saw as a limit to the imagination natural to young minds. Whenever I asked a Namibian child what he or she wanted to be when they grew up I would get invariably the same answers: a nurse, a teacher, an engineer. All admirable careers, but the answers all lacked vision. What kind of nurse? Did they know they could specialize and become an emergency or operating room nurse? Did they know they could teach yoga, programming, or the art of sword making? Did they have any idea that nearly everything in our modern world requires specialized engineering? 

They did not. 

One of my early attempts at lecturing.

My lectures were supposed to expose these young minds to the vastness of human endeavor. I showed them how medicine and engineering produced prosthetics that allowed people to walk, pick up a can of soda, or see again. I showed them people who taught machines how to dance, open doors, and run on two legs like its creators. I showed them devices engineered to take people into the deepest, darkest, coldest places on earth and view, first hand, creatures never seen before by man.

Did it work? 

I don’t know. They were wowed when the watched a Boston Dynamics robot do a backflip and open a door without human assistance. They appeared mesmerized by men and women who seemed to possess comic book-like powers granting them superhuman speed, and strength through engineered prosthetics. They gasped when a diver surprised an octopus that had disguised itself as a rock. The students and teachers applauded loudly an asked for more, but did any of it mean anything?

I like to think that my lectures and presentations were more than hour-long distractions. I earnestly hope that hearing me talk and showing them video snippets of the world beyond their classrooms and auditoriums planted a seed in what I hope were minds still fertile and nourished with imagination and wonder. But I’m a realist, I know I will likely never know if anything I said or showed took root.

I left Namibia is 2020 as COVID became a pandemic. Some of those high schoolers may be freshman now in the University of Namibia or other institutes of higher eduction. Hopefully, by the time they are seniors, they will have decided of a career path and, hopefully, a few may remember the lectures and videos I showed and make a decision based on what they saw and heard.

I suppose what I’m wondering at the moment is what many teachers must wonder at some point in their career: did I make a difference? I am no teacher, but the sentiment is the same and I’ll likely never know if I made a difference, but I believed it was worth the effort. 

Maybe I should keep trying.

Stay tuned.

Vern 

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Home Again, Home  Again! 

Seems I barely had time to get things done in Namibia before the dreaded COVID-19 virus forced me and Peace Corps Volunteers worldwide to come home. I think I’m luckier than most, I got to see my primary projects to completion and even had time to get a secondary project off the ground. I also was able to be in Namibia for almost 3 years. That, in itself, is something to crow about.

If you’ve read any of my previous posts you’ll know that one of my projects was getting a solar power system setup for a groups of miners and their families. The system provides power to their workshop so that they can run the tools they need to process the stones they mine. The system also provides power to recharge batteries the miners can take back to their homes to power lights and small appliances, it avails ample power for a community refrigerator so that they can buy and store fresh meats and vegetables, and it provides power for security lighting for their market. I was also able to get roadside signs installed to alert travelers of the market well before they reach it, which should increase visitor traffic once tourism starts back up. There are about 50 families that will benefit from the project and I can’t tell you how happy I am that it was completed before I had to leave.  

Unfortunately, COVID-19 happened which pretty much shut down the country. If you think we have it bad imagine you earn your living digging semi-precious stones out of an arid desert. Your family lives there too. Water has to be trucked in. The land is too harsh to garden so you must buy what you need to eat and live from stores 20 or more kilometers away. You can make a living mining these stones, but you are solely dependent on tourists. Now imagine that suddenly there are no more tourists and you begin to see the plight of the miners and so many of their countrymen. I continue to get some reports from colleagues in Namibia and some stories are hard to hear. I remain hopeful that the situation will improve quickly.

As I mentioned, Peace Corps Volunteers worldwide were sent home. I can’t imagine how hard it was for the director of the Peace Corps, Dr. Jospehine Olsen, to make that call, but it was the right call to make. As the seriousness of COVID-19 became increasingly apparent around the world and countries, and more significantly, travel companies began to restrict flights going into and out of known infected areas, travel option became fewer. While we felt relatively safe in Namibia, getting a bit over 120 volunteers home in the event of an emergency was becoming mounting challenge. While many of us wanted to see our efforts in Namibia through to the end, leaving when we did was the best choice. 

It happened quickly. Many of us didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to our friends with whom we’ve lived and worked beside for so long. And there isn’t enough words to express the gratitude to the staff at Peace Corps Namibia for getting the volunteers home safe and sound. It was a huge effort to find flights and out-process 120+ in a matter of a few days, an effort that normally takes several weeks.

Here’s a video I put together of our evacuation. 

So, I’ve been back in the States for 4 weeks now. So much has changed. More on this in my next post, and I promise it will be soon. Until then…

Stay tuned.

Vern