The beginning of our Christmas holidays - the journey to Windhoek

The Christmas/ Summer holiday began with hitch-hiking. We didn't have an organised lift up to Windhoek, which is about a 5 hour drive from Tses (depending on the type of lift you get) so we were having to hope we would be able to get a lift. For once, we were actually incredibly lucky. A car kindly stopped to give us a lift to the hiking point which saved us from a boiling half hour walk. Even then we were able to find a bit of shade and only had to wait about half an hour until a car stopped.

Now what I am about to say could be taken as being racist, but it's quite simply the truth. In general, white people do not give lifts. In the 5 months that we've been here we have only ever been picked up by three white people. One was a trucker who was simply curious about why we were here, one was a woman who is friends with someone high up in Peace Corps and so always gives lifts to white girls she suspects are volunteers, and one was from a guy doing a 10 hour drive from Luderitz to Windhoek who wanted someone to chat to and was curious as to why we were trying to hike. 

It is also true that you can almost always guess if a driver is black or white by the type of car they drive. Bluntly, when we see a flashy looking car racing down the road we normally just assume that it's going to be a white driver who will never pick us up. 

So that first day when we saw an expensive looking silver car racing down the road we didn't even bother trying to flag it down, convinced that it was some white person who would drive right past us giving us nothing more than a curious glance. We were wrong. Very wrong as it turned out. The car stopped and inside were two black guys who offered to take us all the way to Windhoek in their fast, air-conditioned car. Heaven! 

The two guys were really nice (although I must confess that I can no longer remember their names) even though they were as different as chalk and cheese. It turned out that the driver had gone to university in England to study biological engineering or something like that. He's now working on setting up more universities in Namibia, which is pretty important since there are only two here at the moment. The passenger was slightly less serious than the driver, questioning us about our non-existent drug habits. We actually had to stop at one point so that he could have a smoke himself, it was so strong that Daisy and I felt like we were getting affected by just the smoke that clung to him as he got back into the car!

We did have a strange moment though. WARNING, if you get queasy/ don't like reading about gruesome things, skip this paragraph. As we were driving along we saw that there had been some sort of weird accident with some horses. There were three of them lying at the side of the road, all with strange injuries. One was completely decapitated, its head nowhere in sight, one had a broken spine - with it's spine actually coming out of its back, and one was lying on its back, a broken leg sticking at a weird angle. The guys decided that they wanted a better look and so we had to turn around and drive past them again whilst one of them took photos. Very strange!

But they were really nice guys. When we stopped at a service station they waited patiently as we stood in the queue to buy some things. They even took us all the way to the hostel, even though they had no idea where it was and so had to drive around for a while trying to find it. And after all of that they didn't even charge us the 150 dollars each (10 pounds) that's normally expected! Faith in humanity got restored just a little bit that day :)

Ruben's Birthday!

The birthday princess!

At the end of the term it was also Ruben's birthday and so he and Anne came over to celebrate at our house. I baked a chocolate cake for him and we all sat outside on the steps eating and chatting. And since it was the end of term, and we technically weren't teachers the others were even able to sit and have a beer, much to their delight.

The end of term 3

So, time to catch up with blog posts! At the end of the last term (term 3) Daisy and I had to help invigilate with some of the Grade 7 exams, which basically just meant that we had a nice chance to sit at the back of the exam hall, listening to our iPods and working on our Christmas cards for our families!













Of course even exams here had a true Namibian style to them. There were days when learners would sleep in and miss their exams, or they simply couldn't be bothered to turn up. The were kids seemingly giving up 10 minutes into a 60 minute exam and just going to sleep on their desks, and other kids not thinking to bring anything to write with, meaning that we had to hand out a ridiculous number of pens.

There was one exam when a learner had to be dragged out of the exam hall by the teacher, while she tried to kick him and stab him with her pen. Another exam where every single child was beaten by the teacher for misbehaving - Daisy and I quickly left the exam hall so that we didn't have to watch.

But there were amusing moments as well, like watching as the learners had to carry all of their desks and chairs backwards and forwards to the dining hall every single day in the boiling heat. Not something that you would see in England!







There was an amazing evening when we sat in the hostel yard watching a lightning storm. Tses itself was dry, but in a circle around us we could hear thunder and see lightning. We dragged a couple of arm chairs out into the yard and sat there watching the lightning and chatting, while i recorded videos of the amazing storm (unfortunately i am yet to work out how I can put videos on here, but I will continue trying!)

Once the learners in the senior hostel had finished with their exams, they were put to work cleaning the yard. The boys picked up all the rocks in the yard and threw them over the fence, while the girls swept the entire yard to try to get rid of the smaller pebbles. The bushes were cut and cleared and that evening there was an amazing bonfire just outside the hostel yard as the boys burnt the rubbish.

There was another incredible evening when there was a dust storm, a real storm and sunshine all at the same time. It meant that in one direction the sky was turned this strange pinky colour from the dust, in another direction the sky looked as though it was on fire, whilst a rainbow also appeared. It created one of the most amazing skies I think i've yet seen here in Tses!