Another Good Day

The weather in the national newspaper on may 8^th said:

“In the north hot.

In the Namib very hot.”

In Tsumeb it took me only a half an hour to hitch a ride. I jumped straight in the back of a ute where two other people were nestled in amongst bags, bedding and baskets of goods, I fell asleep within minutes. I don’t know how long I was asleep for, but maybe half way to my destination the driver woke me up. He told me he wanted me to sit in the cabin with him. I was comfortable in the back and didn’t want to move, I wondered why he wanted me and not one of the others up front, though maybe I could guess.

I wasn’t in the mood for small talk, so I was probably lucky that he wanted to do all the talking, but he talked so fast I only caught half of what he was saying.

He told me he was a criminal prosecutor, went to university in Wales and has travelled extensively. It surprised me then that he was carting a car full of passengers for extra dollars, but maybe that is why he let me on board for N$50, when initially he had asked for N$120. He said black people can’t be trusted, it wasn’t the first time a black person had said that to me about their own people. It always confused and worried me, just that morning I had been told that not so long ago Sunday school was teaching kids that God created them just to serve white people, and now I figured that those lessons were still engrained in people today.  He said that because black people, especially black men, can’t be trusted he wouldn’t feel right not taking me all the way to Grootfontein. Interesting still that a black man who picked me up hitch-hiking couldn’t stand the thought of a black man picking me up hitch-hiking.

Once again carrying my 22kilo pack I walked from place to place searching for a room in my price range. A young guy said hello to me outside a supermarket, as young guys always did, only that time I stopped to talk and ask him if he knew where a cheap bed was. He made a phone-call to someone who did know and he yelled into the phone “fuck you! Tell me where it is!” After some more yelling back and forth the person on the other end finally gave him directions. That whole interaction made me a little nervous.  

He walked me to my room for the night and on the way there he told me he was a hustler. “So how exactly do you make your money? What sort of things do you do?” He refused to tell me but kept saying “it’s nothing too dirty”.

He was 25 years old, and oddly for Africa we never introduced ourselves so I never did get his name. I ended up enjoying his company, and when we arrived at the back of the house I was staying in I bought us both an Apletiser and we sat together drinking them under a lemon tree.

He was quite a deep thinker, and very switched on. He told me how he doesn’t trust preachers, that he thinks alcohol ruins people, that black people breed too much even when they can’t afford to have children and that the world is obsessed with consumerism, brands and the new ‘this and that’. His big dream is to make lots of money, but not for himself, he wants to use it to buy truck-loads of food and go in to the slums and feed people. I ended up walking him back into town and not once did he ask for my details, money or a date.

My accommodation was a room at the back of someone’s house. It was very basic but cheap enough. The man of the house was sitting on the front porch drinking beer with his friends. His wife and her sister were so beautiful they could be models. They both had two scars under each eye, about an inch long. I asked them where it had come from and one of them explained to me that as baby’s they had vision problems so their parents cut them and rubbed the blood in their eyes to heal them. I wondered how both of them managed to get eye problems and if this was the same reason given for the numerous locals I had seen with the exact same scars.

They asked me if I would go to the shops with them, they had a bar in the house which was open to locals and they needed to stock it for the night. I agreed and ended up spending the afternoon lugging boxes of beer for them. They gave me a shot of caramel vodka as thanks.

I took myself out to dinner that night, at the only open eatery I could find. To entertain myself I imagined someone telling me I had to spend the rest of my life in that town and enjoyed the feeling of dread at the mere thought of it. It really didn’t seem like Grootfontein had much going for it.

When I got back to my room the dozen men drinking at the bar were already loud and drunk. I thought that if my hustler friend from early that day was there I’d have a drink with him, the slurred invites from the older men weren’t all that appealing. The door to my room was right next to the bar and it didn’t even close properly let alone lock. I lay awake until the early hours of the morning when the party finally dissipated.

The next morning I left early to get a bus that was going to take me all the way to Livingstone (in Zambia to see the Victoria Falls), which I thought was departing at 10am. At the station I was told by the attendee that it wasn’t actually leaving until 10pm. I didn’t want to take out anymore Namibian dollars as I’d be leaving the country soon, so I didn’t have any cash on me, but I did have some bread and biscuits and figured it wouldn’t be much fun but it also wouldn’t kill me.

I sat on the side of the road to read my book for the next ten hours… it’s not like I had anything else to do.

In the afternoon a woman named Daonetta walked over to me. Naturally she was curious why this young white woman was sitting in the sun alone on the side of the road. We chatted for a while and she invited me to her sister’s house to wait out of the sun and off the side of the road.

At her sister’s house there was her sister, her brother-in-law, their son, and both of her parents. I felt intrusive but they seemed happy I was there and were very welcoming. Her mother wanted to show me the hospital where she worked as a nurse in the children’s ward. So Daonetta and both her parents and I went for a drive around the town, Daonetta and I lying side by side in the back of the ute. We stopped in the wealthy streets to scrutinize the mansions (owned by the white people), followed by a guided tour of the hospital. It was much cleaner and better equipped than the other two hospitals I had visited in Africa so far.

Daonetta’s sister’s house was a quaint one-bedroom brick home, with no running water system, in a neighbourhood where only black people lived. Whilst we were gone her sister had cooked some rice and fish and insisted I eat with them. I knew it was rude not to, but they gave the two men and myself a whole fish each, while the three women and the child shared just one. I didn’t want a whole one to myself, especially when it meant that the others had to share, but I knew that it would be rude to refuse. Their generosity melted my heart.

The conversation was very pleasant, they asked a lot about my family at home, about Australia, about my opinions of Namibia. And then Africa’s Big Brother was on and the conversation ended. Africa’s Big Brother is surely the world’s most boring TV viewing. I had actually already seen an episode in Ghana a few months earlier and it definitely had not gotten any better since then. I pretended to be interested while they explained each character to me, the love triangles and the bitch fights and each one told me their favourite person and begged me to pick a favourite of my own.

After Big brother it was time to be dropped back at the station to get my bus. Danonetta’s sister asked me to take a group photo on my camera and upload it to their laptop (I was a little surprised they had a lap top actually). She said:

“We must have a photo of you here with us to show our friends, or else no one will believe that a white woman was at our house eating with us.”

In the car on the way to the station Daonetta got a text message from her sister. It said:

‘We miss Kai already’.

I am such a softy I wanted to cry.

When the bus pulled up we shared long hugs goodbye and I watched them through the window waving until the shape of them faded from sight.

The hospitality and friendliness of the locals from the last three nights in a row had been a saving grace for my spirit. In the North of Namibia I had begun feeling resentment and defeat, the people had been rude, and hostile and were either demanding money or falling down drunk. I couldn’t get out of Namibia fast enough.

But the experiences of my last few days in Namibia had rejuvenated me and renewed my hope. The night I had slept at the Megameno family’s house and ate birthday cake with them in the morning, the hustler and his wise view of the world and then Daonetta, her family and the fish.

worst photo of me ever! But decided to suck it up and post it anyway