IT'S FREAKING RAINING

So, I've now seen rain on the continent of Africa.  That's pretty cool, especially since Namibia is so dry, but it rained a little today. It started out as a little drizzle, that got us all very excited, and then really started to come down for a few minutes. It was really refreshing.
Anyway, you might be wondering why I haven't posted in about three forevers.  It's mostly because I'm lazy, but I've actually been super busy the past couple of weeks.  Before leaving for Swakopmund I had a big paper due, and then I was sans internet for 5 days, and I've now had a lot more work to do since I've been back, both with school and with planning my fall break trip to Victoria Falls, which is going to be SUPER AWESOME.
Swakopmund (known to the locals as Swakop, for short) is a touristy costal town where you can feel the German influence much more than you can in Windhoek.  Most of the architecture is very German, there are more signs and things written in German, and there are a lot more German tourists, so you here the language everywhere.  The ocean is really beautiful there, but it's much colder on the coast than it is in Windhoek, so it was too cold to spend all our time on the beach.   A good portion of our time there we were free to just explore the city and do fun things, although we did have some educational things to do during the day, like visiting some NGOs and talking to government officials, mostly about free trade--there's a big important harbor near Swakop called Walvis Bay which is an Export Processing Zone, which basically means foreign businesses can come there and set up factories and the like with no tax and little government intervention. It was decently interesting, although all the educational stuff was not quite as organized as it could hve been.
We had Saturday completely off, and a lot of people had already planned things like ATVing on the dunes and going on marine-life boat tours.  A few of us just decided to wing it when we got there.  'd heard of something called sandboarding, which is basically snowboarding down dunes, but didn't really know too much about it. However, I randomly met a guy who was staying at the same backpackers' lodge that we were who worked for a sandboarding company and gave us really good rates. It was a blast! We graduated to bigger and bigger dunes over the course of the morning, and also got to slide down a really steep one on these waxed pieces of masonite. It was awesome.  Once Laurie gets the pictures onto her computer, I'll try to share some. The desert is really amazing there.  First of all, it comes right up to the ocean. So driving along the coast, if you look out one window, you could be in the middle of Saudi Arabia, and if you look out the other window you could be on the Oregon coast. It's really quite remarkable.  And then once you're over the first row of dunes, it's just sand as far as you can see in any direction, which is simultaneously mind-boggling and breath-taking. We had a lot of fun exploring the city, too, we found some fun little restaurants and clubs, and spent a good deal of time being really cold on the beach.
There's not all that much else to report, really. We leave for the North, which includes our rural homestays and going to the Etosha game reserve on Sunday or Monday, and the six of us in our fall break group (Me, Lizz, Christiana, Kayla, Maggie and Caitlin) are going to catch a bus straight from there to Livingstone, Zambia to hang out at Victoria Falls.  There's a lot of cool stuff to do there, and we'll probably venture into Botswana a little bit as well--we're really just winging it, while staying at a really cheap (US$8/night) backpackers' hostel. There are some really cool things to do there that I will be to scared to do, like bungee jumping into the gorge of the falls, and going swimming at a still pool right at the edge of the 400 ft falls, with 500 million liters of water around you rushing over the edge every minute. Those would be cool stories to have, I just don't think I'm up for that adventure.
Right now I should be working on this resreach paper. The prompt is to talk about one aspect of globalization and how it's either helping or hurting society, so I'm looking into philanthropy/social welfare projects and philsophies of multinational corporations and the theories behind them. It's pretty interesting, althoguh I'm kind of sick of the paper.  Like everything in the world of development, there's a lot of both good and bad involved in it.
My internship is going pretty well too.  I don't absolutely love it, and I still sometimes feel like I'm floundering in the classroom, but I'm defintiely starting to have a better time there, and occasionally feel like I'm really doing something useful.  Monday I only had six kids, so I did a math tournament with basic math facts the whole time, which was pretty fun, and today we sort of rambled and talked about a lot of things, and then I tried to teach them about past tense verbs, esp. irregular ones (I got the idea to do that because I noticed that nobody knew how to make "fight" past tense when I had them write about Sam Nujoma, who was the first president of Namibia).  I think that went over decently.  I did struggle a bit philosophically, because I was told to tell them that they weren't allowed to speak Damara in the classroom (apparently a lot of them had been swearing or something).  I'd already been thinking a lot about mother-tongue education and how it's probably so much better, so that really hit home for me.  Especially because the catalyst of the Soweto uprisings in '76 was Afrikans being used as the medium of education in Black schools.  I don't really see all that much difference with Black children in Namibia and South Africa (and at Hispanic people in the States) having to learn everything in English. So that's something that I'm struggling with, and not really expecting to get any answers on. Although maybe some insights will grow as I continue my work and study
I think the only other interesting thing that I have to report is that this morning we went and saw a really interesting speaker who is a pastor at the Dutch Reformed Church, which if you happen to know anything about the history of Southern Africa, you'll know was pretty much the church of Apartheid, which makes sense being an Afrikaner institution and all.  This guy was far from a bigot, though. He grew up in the Church but always had serious problems with Apartheid (all his playmates growing up were Black South Africans, to the point that for a while when he was little he thought in Zulu). He became a pastor in the mid-80s right around the time that the church was changing its positions, and was a voice in favor of doing so.  He's still pushing for more liberalization of the church, and to the chagrin of a lot of his parishioners, welcomes homeless people into the church on a regular basis. He also had some cool political views.  For one thing, he was very much for mother-tongue education, which was refreshing, although, that brought up the question of whether or not that would de-facto re-segregate the schools, and whether or not that cost was worth the benefits. He was also very much wary of any sort of foreign, or even internal, aid, because he thinks--and I agree, mostly--that the people receiving the aid must determine what form the help takes.  You have to ask people what they need and provide it instead of just decided what they need and giving that to them. That, he said, is a form of modern Apartheid. It was interesting that he talked so much about that, since it's a lot of what we've been discussing in Development class.  He also shared, which I thought was cool, that in the Dutch Reformed Church, the highest paid employee is allowed to earn no more than seven times the lowest paid employee.  Which not only keeps things more level but makes it so that if the head honcho wants to give himself a raise he has to bring everyone else up with him. He said a lot of other cool thing that I'm not remembering right now, but if you're interested feel free to ask, and I'm sure I can pull some stuff out.
Anyways, I think that's all for now. Don't hesitate to ask anything!
I now need to either get some work one or go to bed
Best,
Jimmy