On the road to somewhere

Before leaving Mariental, a couple of things happened that still brings a smile to my face. Unlike Russ who had longterm contact with students during his Peace Corps stint, I was mostly working with adults. Paul was one of them, and it was definitely good to catch up with him. Most of the social workers have either died or moved out of the area. One of them was Elaine in Bloemfontein and that was wonderful to visit with her. In my second year however, Bridgette and I started a girls group and then Jen and I worked together with a group of about a dozen girls. I saw two of the young women yesterday and they knew me immediately, even before I could recognize them. They are married now, with kids of their own and it was lovely to talk. I also visited with our neighbor when we lived in the hostel. Mrs. Shehama and her three kids were like family to us during that first year.

There is a big new youth center in town and I met the Peace Corps volunteer who is there now. Despite not having a job description (which I didn’t have either), she seems to have carved out a niche and her time in Mariental has been good. It’s a good feeling knowing that there are solid, sane people in place coming after you. Peace Corps can get pretty wacky, and more than once Russ and I have thought they should bring back the pre-service psych testing.

Last night we had dinner with my friend Hannalie. I was so happy to see her happily on her own, running her own business. Hannalie was a close confidante; we spent several evenings after work drinking red wine, and playing field hockey during the weekends. I lived with her family for a short period, and she was the one who took me to Pretoria to get the lasik surgery eleven years ago. Like my time has been with Hanlie and Marita over the past couple of weeks, it seems as though no time had elapsed. We just picked up where we left off which is an incredible feeling of friendship.

We headed south for the two hour drive to Keetmanshoop, which turned into four hours because we took our time, stopping for lunch and driving out of the way to see the Quivertree Forest (which are more like aloes than trees). The topography changed from some hills to incredibly flat expanses of scrub brush. There aren’t even any trees, just bushes and the occasional goat.

We stopped over in Bethanie instead of driving a further four hours to Luderitz and were pleasantly surprised. Twelve years ago, Bethanie was a sleepy, dusty little town with not much going on, forty kilometers off the main road. It most definitely still is but now has a comfortable guesthouse. It’s nice having the time to stop at a place like this; we normally would have driven right through.

Here we are in Luderitz for the next several days before we meet up with friends from Gaborone to show them the south. While we still have quite a bit of driving to do over the next three weeks, we have now essentially driven Namibia from end to end, from Katima Mulilo to the southern coast.