Grabbed, Kissed and Followed

On my first morning in Addis, I woke to the sounds of chickens on my doorstep and the Muslim call to prayer.

I went to a little café across the road from my hotel for breakfast, everything was white inside – the walls, the floors, the tables the seats, it was decorated with excessively ornate wall hangings and glass centrepieces, it was quite garish actually. Nothing on the menu looked especially Ethiopian so I ordered a coffee and a croissant with egg.

When the food arrived I tried to remember what Mika had told me about the strict rules around eating in Ethiopia: Never, ever use your left hand to eat, never let food touch your hand above the knuckles and never lick your fingers. It was quite challenging trying to pull the croissant apart with one hand.

I also tried to learn some basic Amharic but each phrase is different depending on whether you are talking to a man or woman, and sometimes it changes depending on your own gender and the age of the person you are talking to, which effectively meant I had to learn each word in 2-4 different ways. I gave up on the language lesson before it had really begun and sat and stared out the window instead. I watched a mule lug a large load up a hill with a young boy on its heals hitting its bum with a stick. Taxis and BMWs swerved around it beeping and I marvelled at such a unique sight.

The first guy I met on that first day in Addis was named Tom. He took me to a shop to buy a sim card for my phone and what I liked most about him was that when I wanted to leave he let me. He didn’t beg or demand that I stay with him longer and he didn’t follow me for blocks like all the other men did that day. The only thing I didn’t clue onto straight away was that because he set up my phone for me, he had my new phone number, but I wouldn’t realise that until the next day.

After meeting Tom I had a series of run-ins with local men.

On two separate occasions I was nearly robbed. The first time, a man was walking along the street beside me and subtly got closer and closer. It was hard to tell if it was just the result of having to walk in over-crowded streets or if he was trying to sleaze on to me. But then he gingerly put his hand in my pocket and I shoved him away. The second time I had a guy run up to me and grab my ankles. Another man appeared out of thin air and also tried his hand in my pocket. I screamed and they both ran off and I thought with relief how much worse it would be if I had a bag with me.

The other big bother of the day was John. He claimed to work for a newspaper and at first I believe him because he seemed to know a lot about Australian politics and Julia Gillard. But he gave me that same creepy feeling I had gotten in Ghana from the guy on the bridge that was chased away from me by protective locals who knew he was up to no good.

Whilst walking along the street with John following closely behind me I was stopped by a preacher man. Even he asked for my number. I lied to him as well as John and said I didn’t have a phone but he made me write down his number.

John would not leave me alone. At first I politely told him I was happy walking alone, then I told him I was meeting a friend at a café which I ducked into quickly, but he waited outside for me. I got angry and told him that he had to leave me alone.

“I am not a bad man! I want to be your friend! I have been nice to you!”

Eventually I shook him off when I said that my male friend was meeting me. The walk back to my hotel I kept looking over my shoulder expecting him to be lurking ten feet away.

So the next morning when Tom called I actually said yes to meeting up with him. My hope was that with him beside me I wouldn’t get harassed by other men or robbed.

He picked me up from the hotel and we walked for over an hour and a half. We stopped at a museum to see the oldest human skeleton ‘Lucy’ and he walked me through the Hilton hotel which was like a mini gated city with its own shops, pools, tennis courts, restaurants and bars and finally we walked to the palace.

I was right about one thing, men didn’t stop and harass me and no one tried to rob me. But he did insist on holding my hand. Which, although it didn’t happen in South Africa at all, and only once in Namibia, I must have been used to it from West Africa because it didn’t even bother me.

We stopped for a traditional Ethiopian lunch. I had been looking forward to trying the food there. When I lived in Amsterdam I had eaten Ethiopian food a couple of times and loved it.

The restaurant was dark and dingy, which I like. Tom took me to a drum of water and placed a small, slimy blue rock of soap into the palm of my hands.

Lunch was a large round pancake, like a ‘family’ sized pizza and on it sat globs of various sauces and some fatty pieces of what I guessed was goat. I had expected the pancake to be warm, but it was cold and damp and it felt just like eating a wet sponge. It was slightly bitter tasting too. With my right hand only I tugged at the wet sponge and scooped up red pieces of dripping sauce. It didn’t taste too bad, if only the sponge (called Injara) had been warm it wouldn’t have been so bad. I was paying more attention to following the strict Ethiopian rules of eating etiquette than I was to the taste of the food.

“Do you chew?” Tom asked me

I was confused… of course I chew, I mean, the food is soft so I suppose I don’t chew a lot, but I definitely chewed.

“No, no… chat! Do you chew chat?”

Considering I had no idea what he was talking about I assumed that I don’t in fact ‘chew chat’.

He took me into an even darker, even dingier bar. It was probably made darker and dingier by the think cloud of suffocating cigarette smoke. The floor was carpeted in sticks and dead leaves, and sitting on up-turned crates and boxes were twenty or so men with bunches of leaves poking out of their mouths.

The leaves that littered the floor was the ‘chat’.

Tom inspected some bunches offered to us and chose two.

He gave me a lesson on how to choose the right leaves, how to roll them into a ball and shove them straight in. The idea is to leave them in one side of your mouth, and chew it over and over before finally swallowing.

So I did. And it tasted exactly like you would imagine chewing a bunch of leaves would taste. It was the swallowing I found hard, it wasn’t a horrible experience, but it wasn’t that great either.

We ordered water and some peanuts which I would use to dull the taste and make the chewing a little easier.

“What is it supposed to do exactly?”

“Makes you feel calm and happy. Gives you tingles. Makes you feel awake.”

I scanned the bar, I was definitely the only woman in there. A few groups of young men with dred-locks sipped Coca-Cola in between the hands-full of leaves they shoved in their gobs, but mostly the bar was occupied by middle aged men, who also had small cups of black coffee and a newspaper. They definitely looked like they had settled in for the entire day.

Five young guys who knew Tom appeared so they sat with us. They were very friendly guys, and all claimed to be Rasta’s. They were funny and interesting and despite the fact that I was constantly struggling to swallow a steady wad of leaves, I was enjoying myself.

That is until Tom kissed me. Right there in the bar in front of his friends. He totally caught me off-guard. And it took me too long to push him off me. I think I mainly didn’t want to embarrass him in front of his friends.

The chat was making my head tingle a bit, but apart from that I wasn’t feeling any other side-effects. Tom kept insisting I chew more, but after the second bunch I had to stop. It was gross, I was feeling ill from the dead forest inside my belly and Tom kept trying to put his hands on my thigh. I kept pushing his hands away and minutes later they’d re-appear. He tried to kiss me again and again I pushed him off. He tried again, and again, and funnily enough he seemed to be the only one there who couldn’t tell he was getting rejected.

I had to say my goodbyes and leave, which I wasn’t happy about because I liked everyone there except for Tom.

Tom followed me out.

“I have a boyfriend back home. I feel sick from the chat. I am tired. I thought we were just friends. I don’t kiss anyone I just meet.”

My excuses were pathetic, but for some reason I felt like I couldn’t act like I would at home in Australia. For some reason I was scared of just saying no, of being assertive. I felt like a mouse in a cage, weak and cornered. He promised not to kiss me again and for some reason I agreed to have a beer with him.

For a little while he seemed to be friendly, he said he wanted to take me North to meet his parents, I regretted being there instantly. He got aggressive and grabbed my breast and tried to kiss me again. I got up, walked away. He followed me and I shoved him so hard he fell back.

I was acutely aware of the fact that he knew where my hotel was.

I tried to get a taxi.

“How much?” I asked through the window.

“Get in and I will tell you” he replied.

“NO. Tell me now, how much?”

“Get in and I will tell you!”

“Forget it!” I said and stormed off. I was marching away angry when the same cab crawled passed. The driver was leaning across his seat leering at me.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“I want you in my car!”

I kept walking. He stopped the car and got out. I stood confused when he walked up to me and reached out to grab me.

I didn’t know what to do so I just turned and ran.

I had to weave through the sea of people and I turned back to see the driver get back in his car and drive toward me again.

I continued to duck and weave through the people and made a sharp right turn, and a quick left and just kept my head down and kept running.

I didn’t know where I was, but it was dark and I knew I had the shadows on my side.

Eventually I thought that there was no way I hadn’t lost him. I put my head down and walked all the way back to my hotel, rudely dismissing every person who tried to stop me, talk to me or demand money.

Tom and a bunch of chat

The toilet at the chat bar

Ethiopia

From my taxi window the dark streets of Addis Ababa looked grotty, dangerous and exciting.

Like everywhere I had been to in Africa so far the extent of my research on Addis before I actually got there went only as far as a quick scan in Wikipedia and the introduction in the Lonely Planet. All that I did know was that Addis was home to approximately 4 million people, one-fifth of the entire population of Australia (the thought of that horrified me!), and that it was known as the ‘New York of Africa’.

Just like New York the streets were bustling, the roads were congested; mostly with taxis, the neon lights were dizzying. It was a balmy night and although the city sprawled I could see and feel how densely overpopulated it was.

Unlike New York, Addis did not seem finished to me. Every second building was under construction, entire streets were blocked off because the roads had been dug-up and seemingly abandoned. It looked as though a royal family was trying to move into a shanty town: beside three and ten-story high modern glass buildings were small shacks made of scrap pieces of cardboard and plastic; in front of the glow from fashion shops selling big western brands closed for the night were women and their children settling in to sleep on a piece of cardboard or a single blanket. Music leaked from the millions of bars and restaurants jammed side-by-side fighting for space in the over-stuffed streets.

I went straight to my hotel room, and sat in a lime-green and bright orange room with tacky old furniture, peeling paint and sticky-taped floors. I took one of the mini bottles of wine I had lifted off the drinks cart on the aeroplane when no-one was looking and made a toast:

“To surviving West Africa and thriving in Southern Africa, I now begin the last leg of my journey. May it be full of good times, good lessons and beauty in nature and in its people. May I experience a rich culture, eat good food, live in the moment more and stop missing home.”

Well, it went something like that anyway.

The end of that chapter

From Livingstone I took a bus to Lusaka the capital so that I could get a flight to Ethiopia – my last country of destination (which would also be the country most challenging and most rewarding to travel in).

From the bus window I decided I liked Zambia (even though it was only a very short time that I had spent there), it was rustic and colourful like West Africa, and most of the people I had met were friendly.

Getting off the bus in Lusaka I met Mika, a 23 year old Israeli girl. Her plan was to backpack around Africa for a year, her reward for completing the prerequisite time in the army.

She had already been to Ethiopia, and loved it! Though her brother lives there with his Ethiopian wife, so I think that made her experience there a hell of a lot easier.

She warned me that Ethiopians are proud but begged shamelessly (I didn’t know at that stage how that could work), she said they are stubborn, scam you and charge you for everything.

“But for every scammer there is a friendly person who welcomes you into their home and shares their food with you. In Ethiopia you never eat alone”.
We had dinner together at an all-you-can-eat Indian restaurant. She gave me plenty of tips about where to go and what to see, I duly noted everything down.

“And fleas… you will get fleas everywhere you go… you just get used to it.”

She said she loved Ethiopia so much that she wished she could go with me. I also wished that she could have. She was cool and insightful and even had very liberal views of the Israel-Palestine war, she had even marched in protest against the occupation.

We spent the next day together at an internet café, we changed money and haggled people to get the right prices for everything. She was so good at bargaining and didn’t take shit from anybody, I was impressed, though every Israeli woman I have ever met has been strong and assertive. However she was impressed with how calmly I refused the not so subtle sexual offers of a guy named God: "I want to feel your warmth" he said holding two fingers up.

Waiting for the plane to Ethiopia I pondered my place in the Southern countries of Africa. And this is what I wrote:
 
'In West Africa I had wanted so badly not be seen as a typical white person. I made sure I only ate street food, and drank at small bars with locals.

But in South Africa I ended up making friends with white people. I ate in restaurants and drank in bars where white people ate and drank. I stayed in large houses and lodges and went on private safaris and I ended up doing what all white people do here. Black people in Southern Africa are not going to the same places I was going and they are certainly not being served by white people and having white people clean up their mess after them.

My skin is white and for that reason, and that reason only, I have fallen squarely on one side of the racial divide. It couldn’t have happened any other way. That is just how it works here. Maybe it won’t always be like this. Hopefully it wont always be like this. But right now, in 2012 that is just how it is'.

Nearly Caught in My Criminal Act

I am in the running for being the most unorganized, ill prepared and just plain vague traveller.

Crossing the boarder to get into Zambia in the middle of the night I realized that I didn’t have US$5 or local equivalent to buy the visa to get in. I scanned the queue and focused in on two young looking white travellers. They were going to Livingstone as well, and I encouraged them not only to stay at the hostel I was booking in to but also to lend me the 5 bucks until then.

In Livingstone I had planned to get some Zimbabwean million and trillion dollar notes and wondered if I would have to cross the boarder into Zimbabwe somehow to get some. Right outside the backpacker’s door was a young hustler.
“Can I get you something?” he asked.
“Like what?”
“Anything at all. You want it, I get it”
“Ok, I want a trillion dollar note”
He pulled out a wad of notes from one of his many pockets.
There were a few ten and twenty million dollar notes, and a few ten and twenty billion dollar notes.
“Any trillion ones?”
“Come with me, one minute walk I can get you some. You smoke hash? Can get you hash!”

Got to love hustlers for their resourcefulness!

Later I was walking up the main street of Livingstone when I met Thomas. I was buying grilled corn on the cob from a street seller. He stopped to tell me that he was surprised and amazed to see a white person eating street food. I told him I was hungry for a proper meal, and did he know somewhere I could get good, cheap local food. He was even more shocked and said he will take me to eat Sima. Leading me there he kept asking if I was sure I wanted to go and if I was scared.

I ate my Sima, shredded salty spinach and beef with my fingers, as I had gotten used to doing in West Africa. Thomas was really and truly amazed then. He kept repeating that white people don’t eat with their fingers, and he did an imitation of someone very delicately eating with a knife and fork.

I didn’t understand a lot of what he said, he talked all the time, he talked fast, and most of his sentences ended in ‘what what’:

“White people come to Zambia with ideas about what what. But the black people here don’t want to work, they want to relax and what what. So the white people do this and that and what what… you understand?”

I nodded as though I did, I got the general gist, but I really felt like the key verbs in his arguments were missing.

And then he really shocked me.

Out of nowhere he asked me if I was a lesbian.

“What! No! Why? What! No!”

Perhaps I was a little too quick to answer and deny it. Perhaps my eyes were wide with fear and my ‘no’ was a little too high pitched and a little too defiant, because he asked me several more times.

Apart from in the little gay nook in Melville Johannesburg, no African had questioned my sexuality. In fact, I usually went to great lengths with my over embellished ‘boyfriend back home’ story. Thomas wasn’t buying the boyfriend story.

After he asked me a few times I told him that if he asks me again I’ll leave, and he didn’t ask again.

I wonder what would have happened if I had said yes. He may not have cared at all. He said he wasn’t gay but because he worked in a 5-star hotel on the Zambezi he had seen gay people before.

It didn’t feel right denying who I am, but I had just arrived in a country where homosexuality is illegal. It would have been confessing a crime to a total stranger. And worse than that, who I am and what I do is considered a mortal sin, and in most of Africa the law of God is even more powerful than the law of man.

The next day I went to Victoria Falls with the two young British girls who lent me the 5 dollars and shared a room with me in the hostel. They were only 19, had ridiculously posh accents and referred to their parents as ‘mummy and daddy’. We all did the 150m gorge swing together in the morning, I jumped on my own and they jumped tandem.

“Oh! I would like to buy the video” one said to the other “But I think I may have sworn when we jumped and I simply cannot let mummy know I used such language”.

The smoke that thunders was quite wondrous. You could hear it roaring from kilometers away. We slowly trudged the path around it, yelling at each other over its thunder. All around was just thick white mist that poured down on us like torrential rain. Everything was drenched, including my camera  which even though it had been wrapped tightly in plastic it stopped working.

The falls were powerful and impressive, even though we couldn’t actually see much.

I wanted to bunji over the falls, 111m free fall, it would have been awesome. But as I stood on top of the bridge looking down I realized it would only really be fun if there was someone there to egg me on, to cheer loudly for me and pet my back after. And for the first time in a while I felt lonely.

I cooked dinner at the hostel that night. I slipped over in the kitchen and hit my head, I burnt my hand on the fry pan and bit my tongue whilst eating. I cried out of frustration more than anything.

Before I left Livingstone the next day I went to a bureau de change office to get some USD. Yet another framed portrait of the president glared down on me from the wall.

“Why does your president never smile?” I asked the cashier.
“He is confused” he replied, “He is friends with Mugabe”
“That explains why he’s so bitter” I replied.

I would have liked to talk about politics more but his phone rang and he left the room.

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

Hitch-hiking Away

On May 5^th my diary entry began:

“Once again I am about to do something potentially very dangerous. Once again, I am about to do something potentially very stupid”.

I am surprised I hadn’t written more. I still remember the worry and the fear welling up inside me. I remember the lectures I was giving myself, telling myself that it wasn’t worth the risk. I was imagining what my partner, my mother and father, all of my friends would think if they knew what I was about to do.

It was the afternoon of the morning where Chris and I had said goodbye on the side of the road and I was going to hitch-hike alone, in Namibia, heading in the direction of Victoria Falls.

I waited in the scolding sun for about an hour before a truck pulled over and I hoisted myself in. I hate to say it, but because he was a local I assumed I’d have to pay for the ride, I managed to bargain him down to something reasonable, seeing as it was a work truck he wasn’t paying for the petrol. He was a gentle guy. He asked me if there was such a thing as AIDS in Australia. I told him that there was, but it is not as common in Australia as it was in Africa. He said that his 27 year old sister recently died from AIDS.

He insisted that it was dangerous for me to hitch-hike alone, and for a few extra dollars he’ll take me all the way to Oshakati. There he dropped me at the ‘cheapest’ hotel. They wanted N$380, my budget was N$100. I walked to the next place, they wanted N$500, and the next one after that wanted $450. My pack was heavy, the day was hot and it had seemed long, it was getting close to sunset and I was over it.

I was walking circles following vague directions to an advertised lodge when I asked a man if he knew where it was. He just happened to be heading there anyway for a ‘meeting’ but it turned out that lodge was even more expensive than all the rest.

I was about to heave the pack on my back once again when the man he was meeting offered me a bed in his house for the night. I thought it through for an awkward 20 seconds before saying that yes, I would take up his kind, though frightening offer.

I waited in the bar while the two men had their meeting, and that is where I wrote those simple two lines.

 I wondered:

‘How do you tell if someone is capable of rape and murder? You probably can’t. But travelling is full of risks. Risks you have to take. But is staying at the house of a man I know nothing about pushing it a bit too far? I wanted to trust people. I believed it was important to trust people. I had had a lot of luck up until that moment, was it a wave of luck I could continue to ride, or was my luck about to run out? Should I message someone from home and tell them what I am doing in case they don’t hear from me again? But I couldn’t do that, it would just worry them too much.’

But my luck didn’t run out, not at that point anyway.

The man who took me to his house, whose first name I shamefully and regrettably cannot remember (and I never wrote it down, but I later found out his surname is Megameno), drove me to his very nice house, in a very quiet suburb on the edge of Oshakati. He had a beautiful wife and four adorable and extremely polite children. He left not long after I arrived, I assumed he was going to a bar to drink.

His wife offered me food, I was hungry, but too polite to say yes. I already felt intrusive. He had invited me there, she had no idea I was coming to stay, and yet it was her who was left behind to deal with me and her four energetic children.

The eldest daughter was turning 16 the next day, she told me that when she grows up she wants to be a doctor or scientist. The 7 year old girl talked way too much, and was a bit of a know-it-all, but she was so sweet she insisted on carrying my bags to my room for the night and making my bed up for me. The 6 year old girl was very shy, and wanted to read her books mostly, and the 4 year old boy was cute but quite naughty. The kids were hanging off my every move and my every word, and were literally physically hanging off me all night too. They showed me their school report cards, and they took photos with my camera and asked non-stop questions about Australia. The woman was a school principal, she was telling me that children generally struggle to pass exams because they are all in English, but at home and out in the streets they don’t speak English. I remember thinking the same in Ghana, the school system doesn’t make sense and surely it slows students down?

At 6am the next morning there was a knock at the door. The woman was asking what time I had planned to leave. I thought maybe they were wanting me out in a hurry so I said in an hour. I packed my bags and  went to the kitchen to fill up my water bottle. The man was already up, he said  he wanted to drive me to a good spot to hitch hike but first I had to eat breakfast with them.

I found it a little cruel that on her 16^th birthday he made his daughter Albertina make everyone tea and eggs for breakfast. She had already spent the morning tidying up and sweeping the floor. Each of the kids took it in turn to ask how I had slept. Too adorable!

He took me out the front of the house and pointed to the university. It was expanding, he told me, and soon it would be the second biggest university in the country. He went on to talk about education today and in the past during the apartheid era. He talked about when he was at school and all he learnt about were frogs and lizards, while the white kids learnt maths and history. He said that as a kid the white kids in his neighbourhood would call him a monkey. In Sunday school the priest would tell all the black children that white people are made in the image of God and black people were created just to serve them.

His eyes were filled with a mix of sadness and hate and I didn’t know what to say, I felt guilty, I felt that by the colour of my skin I was one of those people teaching his young-self that he was created to serve me.

Our conversation was broken when we were called back inside. The younger children were sitting quietly at a small table taking it in turns to read each other stories. Those children amazed me; so intelligent, so respectful, and they absolutely adored each other and their parents. The younger three had told me the night before that their mother was beautiful like a queen, their father handsome like a king and their big sister was the best sister in the whole world.

After breakfast Albertina proudly pulled her birthday cake out of the fridge. They usually share cake in the afternoon, they told me, but because they have a special guest they were doing it at 8am. Cake was the last thing I felt like, but I ate the huge slab placed in my hands. No candles, or singing, and I wondered if anyone in Namibia does anything like that?

As soon as I swallowed the last bite the man stood up and asked if I was ready to go. I said my thanks and goodbyes and got in the car with Albertina and her dad. I was only in the car for a minute when I had an idea. I had bought a pair of earrings in Ghana which I was saving as a souvenir for someone, why had I not thought earlier to give them to Albertina as a birthday present? I wished my bag was in the seat beside me? Where the hell in my huge pack are they anyway? Could I ask them to wait while I search my bag for them? Is that tacky? When we pulled up I didn’t feel like I could ask them to wait, so I got out of the car and gave her nothing. Still to this day I wish I had given her those earrings.

The family asked me for nothing in return for their hospitality and kindness. The whole time I almost expected them to ask me for money, I actually waited for them to do so. I later felt guilty that I had thought the generosity was loaded. Then I felt even more guilty for not offering them anything. I would have, and probably should have given them some money for everything, but I really was expecting that they would soon enough they would mention a price.

In my experiences in the five African countries I had already been to, you rarely, if ever, get something for nothing from locals. This made my experience with the Megameno family that much more special, they helped me, took a genuine interest in me and wanted nothing in return. But still I wish I had given them something to show my appreciation.