Hey,
I only have two minutes left on this internet session, so this is goign to be short. I just wanted to let everyone know that Cape Town is an absolutely beautiful city, and I want to move here. So far the highlights have been going to Cape Point (the end of Africa), to Robben Island (the Prison where Mandela was and from wehre tehre's an amazing view of the city) and just exploring the city with friends.
It wonderful
More later
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Friday, November 26, 2010
Windhoek, it's been real
So, it's finally over. I ship out for Cape Town in the morning. It's been quite the ride, Namibia, and I'm thankful for that. I sometimes feel like I could have done more, been more proactive about my experience here, but overall it's been absolutely amazing. I don't think I can even comprehend right now how much I've learned here. I've tried to milk these last few days. Wednesday we finished our big projects (Laurie, Lauren and I looked at the effects of the alcohol industry on society, and for the creative part, made the Namibian flag our of bottle caps) Wednesday I went to Katutura to see my homestay family a last time, and had dinner with them, and tonight I had dinner with some members of my rural homestay family who are in Windhoek (one who lives here and I'd only talked to on the phone, and the other being Malakia, my brother from the North, after which I went to temple for the last time and then briefly hit the town. It was good. I also took a nice walk today around the city by myself. I thoguht that was a good way to finish things off. This past week or so has been a lot of work, but also a bunch of fun, we've gone out and done fun things quite a bit, and everyone's been getting along suprisingly well.
I'm really really excited to go to Cape Town. It's supposed to be an amazing city, plus I'll get to see my family there in a week, which is also really exciting.
I'm falling asleep right now, but I think I've said what I needed to say, more or less. Perhaps more in the morning, but definitely more from Cape Town.
I'm really really excited to go to Cape Town. It's supposed to be an amazing city, plus I'll get to see my family there in a week, which is also really exciting.
I'm falling asleep right now, but I think I've said what I needed to say, more or less. Perhaps more in the morning, but definitely more from Cape Town.
Monday, November 15, 2010
It's been too long
It's been almost two weeks. My bad. I've been pretty busy, but also, just lazy, so sorry about that. I've still got a lot of work to be doing as the end of the semester approaches so I'll try to keep this relatively short for covering two+ weeks. Also, it's really rainy today, which is very odd, since we're in the middle of the desert.
When we left off it was Halloween. That weekend was pretty tame, we had a guys' night on Saturday where we just hung out and watched Borat and some soccer (but sam and night are ALWAYS watching soccer) and Sunday night we had a very brief Halloween party, but pretty much everyone dressed up, which was fun. The Zambia group plus Jess went as the 7 Deadly Sins, and I was gluttony, which was fun. Monday our intern had to leave unexpectedly due to a family emergency Stateside, so that caused some shakeups here. When we got back from the south, the intern who was supposed to start in January was here to kind of get settled in and be someone to fill that role and stuff, btu she has to go back ot Cape Town this Friday.
So that made preparing for Wednesday a little more complicated. In our religion class, a group of students "helps to" (and by that i mean "does," the professor is just kind of there, not doing much) organize and lead class. Our topic was "The Contribution of Minority Religions to Social Change" or something like that. So I organized a trip to the synagogue to talk to Zvi, who serves as the rabbi for the shul, although there's no real rabbi, and the others ogranized a trip to an Islamic Cultural center (it looks weird to spell "center" the right way now) where we talked to a very interesting young Imam. He was a convert, so was very fundamental and had a lot of very critical views of Christianity. It's not anything that I hadn't heard before, but it was interesting seeing the difference between hearing those things in a group of secular religion students at Carleton, who all know a good deal abotu Islam, and a group of students who are less informed about Islam and more heavily Christian.
When we got back to the class room we were talking about the role that the synagogue has in social action. Zvi had mentioned that due to their numbers they didn't have much organized social action programming, but a lot of them do things individually. A number of students were extremely critical of this. Interestingly it was the most Christian of our students. They basically, in no uncertain terms, said that that was a bullshit excuse. I felt that they were speaking without understanding a) the nature of the synagoge (yes, there are 60 members, but only a few come regularly and are mostly elderly, so there's not a real base to work with) and b) the nature of charity in Judaism, which I think is often conceptualized more individually than in Christianity. I realized that a little more clearly when I explained tzedakah in terms of tithing, and then had a hard time explaining that it doesn't have to go to the synagogue, and you can just give by yourself. Many of us in the non-Christian camp (both myself and some of the secular students) sort of felt as though they were overzealous in their criticism on Zvi and the shul (somebody used the term "Jew bashing" which I think is a little strong, but it certainly felt a little like that) and we wondered how their response would have differed if it was a small church we'd visited.
I was expecting to encounter ignorance about Judaism from Namibians, but was very suprised by how much there is within this group of Americans. It's just not something I've every really had to deal with before, as Evanston and Carleton both have a reasonably sized population of Jews. I've been asked a lot of strange things like if we celebrate Palm Sunday (no idea how someone could think that...) and if we were allowed to eat beef (we'd be totally screwed if we weren't!) Despite there being another Jewish person on the trip, I also sometimes feel tokenized as a Jew, either just with jokes, which I don't mind much, and probably encourage, and with being asked to speak for Jews as a whole. It doesn't bother me all that much, it was just something that I wasn't expecting to deal with, and it makes me realize how important interreligious dialogue and education really is, which is good because that sort of validates what I'm studying.
Last Thursday-Sunday we were in the South looking at "sustainable development," and how development relates to the tourism industry, but really just being on a camping trip, which was awesome. We had a lot of time to jsut relax. The guys forewent the idea of a tent and slept out under the stars all three nights, which was absolutely amazing. We stayed at three different types of campsites to look at the differences between them. Thursday was a gov't run, or more accurately parastatal campsite, governed by the park system. You could tell it was in a little disrepair, and it was very obviously operating at a loss. We learned later that it was probably going to be shut down soon. It was at a big dam, so there was a lake, which was cool to look at, it was werid to see water. The landscape is very cool in the south, think Mars+South Dakota. The next day we stayed at a community run campsite at the foot of a mountain. It wasn't much at all. Really just a toilet, and couple places to put tents and make fires. We climbed around the mountain though (couldn't go all the way up, because there was a sheer face near the top), which was fun and very beautiful. The next day, we visited a school in community that ran the campsite, and it was really nice to just be able to hang out with some kids. One of their teachers helps run the campsite and he told us that they only make a few bucks a month beyond what it costs to pay the one employee, the guard at the gate, so it's very difficult for them to make any improvements. The last night we stayed at a beautiful lodge, taht had some campsites attached to it. It was part of a group that basically runs private versions of national parks for profit. They guy who spoke to us there had a lot of interesting things to say about conservation and the tourism industry, the jist of which that private companies are better at conservation than the government, because they can make it so that the profit drives the conservation and vice versa. Overall the trip was a great time, and a good recharge. We got to relax in nature a lot--the last night I took a walk by myself around the area underneath the stars, and it was absolutely amazing--and we learned a little bit too, which was a plus
We got back and got right back into the swing of things. Last week I had one pretty tough day at my internship, and one amazing day. Monday I had second grade and they were just totally wild, and I had a very tough time controlling them. I left pretty frustrated and pretty dejected about my abilities as an educator. But on Wednesday, instead of working with a whole class I took out one third grader who's very bright but doesn't really do well in a large classroom setting. Like all of the kids, he's got a lot of really tough things going on at home and in the community, so he's angry a lot and requires a lot of attention. I imagine in school he sort of gets left behind, because teachers don't do well with that sort of thing. They probably just hit him with a ruler until he appears to be paying attention. He didn't want to be separated from the class at first, but once we got into things we did great. We were working on multiplication, until got a little bored of that, but then he asked me if I could teach him long division. And I did. It was great! On and off, throughout the first half of the day, which was math time, he would want to go back to the classroom, but after break he was really excited to come back and work with me some more. I had him read O The Places You'll Go. I'm not sure he really got it, I'd forgotten how abstract it was, but there are some tough words in there, and he did well with those, and he seemed to enjoy it. Working with him was really rewarding, and I think he got a lot out of it too. It made me realize that my strengths when it comes to teaching are in small groups or individually.
Friday in Development class we vistied a really nice private hospital and the Katutura State hospital, which is public and in the middle of the black neighborhood. It was hard to believe we were in the same country. The private hospital seemed nicer than Evanston Hospital, while the Katutura hospital (which I'd been to before when my sister was sick on my urban homestay) was exactly what you'd think of when you think of a hospital in a developing nation. Really crowded, paint peeling off the walls, I stepped on a cockroach. In the wards there were only big rooms, 8 beds, with people suffereing from all kinds of things. The rooms are pretty open, too, big glass windows facing the corridors, no privacy, no real place for visitors to sit. Comparing that to the nice, furnished rooms in the private hospitals, with no more than 3 people, and as few as just one, was remarkable. As was comparing the maternity ward. It was really hard to see this blatant imbalance, especially when it comes to something as important as healthcare. I've got some more thoughts on this, but I'll just leave it there for now. Ask me if you're interested.
I've spent the past few days procrastinating a paper that's due today. It's due at 5, but I have to go to my internship in the afternoon, so it's really due by about noon, when I have to leave. The prompt was to talk about two issues in development and how they affect each other. I was originally going to do education and unemployment, but for religion class this past week we talked about the Church's response to AIDS, and there was a lot of really interesting stuff there, so I decided to write on the Church's response to AIDS, and some of its shortcomings especially in terms of stigmatization, and then how AIDS is in turn forcing the church to change its rhetoric and becoming more of a healing society. We needed primary research, so I talked to that itneresting woman who I talked about from Development class two weeks ago, the one who was very critical of the church, and also to the head of the health wing at the Council of Churches in Namibia, who spoke to our class on Wednesday. I was fascinated by how much what they had to say was similar. Their only major difference was that the CCN guy thought that it was not the Church's place to discuss premarital sex and condom use outside of marriage, and Rosa thought that that was an "excuse." They came at the issue from very different angles, obviously, but both talked about the need for the Church to change its rhetoric, for them to improve education of pastors about AIDS, etc. So that was pretty cool. The paper is turning out better than I thought it would, which is good. As usual, I'm pulling my shit together at crunch time.
Speaking of which, it really is crunch time, so I need to go finish this paper.
When we left off it was Halloween. That weekend was pretty tame, we had a guys' night on Saturday where we just hung out and watched Borat and some soccer (but sam and night are ALWAYS watching soccer) and Sunday night we had a very brief Halloween party, but pretty much everyone dressed up, which was fun. The Zambia group plus Jess went as the 7 Deadly Sins, and I was gluttony, which was fun. Monday our intern had to leave unexpectedly due to a family emergency Stateside, so that caused some shakeups here. When we got back from the south, the intern who was supposed to start in January was here to kind of get settled in and be someone to fill that role and stuff, btu she has to go back ot Cape Town this Friday.
So that made preparing for Wednesday a little more complicated. In our religion class, a group of students "helps to" (and by that i mean "does," the professor is just kind of there, not doing much) organize and lead class. Our topic was "The Contribution of Minority Religions to Social Change" or something like that. So I organized a trip to the synagogue to talk to Zvi, who serves as the rabbi for the shul, although there's no real rabbi, and the others ogranized a trip to an Islamic Cultural center (it looks weird to spell "center" the right way now) where we talked to a very interesting young Imam. He was a convert, so was very fundamental and had a lot of very critical views of Christianity. It's not anything that I hadn't heard before, but it was interesting seeing the difference between hearing those things in a group of secular religion students at Carleton, who all know a good deal abotu Islam, and a group of students who are less informed about Islam and more heavily Christian.
When we got back to the class room we were talking about the role that the synagogue has in social action. Zvi had mentioned that due to their numbers they didn't have much organized social action programming, but a lot of them do things individually. A number of students were extremely critical of this. Interestingly it was the most Christian of our students. They basically, in no uncertain terms, said that that was a bullshit excuse. I felt that they were speaking without understanding a) the nature of the synagoge (yes, there are 60 members, but only a few come regularly and are mostly elderly, so there's not a real base to work with) and b) the nature of charity in Judaism, which I think is often conceptualized more individually than in Christianity. I realized that a little more clearly when I explained tzedakah in terms of tithing, and then had a hard time explaining that it doesn't have to go to the synagogue, and you can just give by yourself. Many of us in the non-Christian camp (both myself and some of the secular students) sort of felt as though they were overzealous in their criticism on Zvi and the shul (somebody used the term "Jew bashing" which I think is a little strong, but it certainly felt a little like that) and we wondered how their response would have differed if it was a small church we'd visited.
I was expecting to encounter ignorance about Judaism from Namibians, but was very suprised by how much there is within this group of Americans. It's just not something I've every really had to deal with before, as Evanston and Carleton both have a reasonably sized population of Jews. I've been asked a lot of strange things like if we celebrate Palm Sunday (no idea how someone could think that...) and if we were allowed to eat beef (we'd be totally screwed if we weren't!) Despite there being another Jewish person on the trip, I also sometimes feel tokenized as a Jew, either just with jokes, which I don't mind much, and probably encourage, and with being asked to speak for Jews as a whole. It doesn't bother me all that much, it was just something that I wasn't expecting to deal with, and it makes me realize how important interreligious dialogue and education really is, which is good because that sort of validates what I'm studying.
Last Thursday-Sunday we were in the South looking at "sustainable development," and how development relates to the tourism industry, but really just being on a camping trip, which was awesome. We had a lot of time to jsut relax. The guys forewent the idea of a tent and slept out under the stars all three nights, which was absolutely amazing. We stayed at three different types of campsites to look at the differences between them. Thursday was a gov't run, or more accurately parastatal campsite, governed by the park system. You could tell it was in a little disrepair, and it was very obviously operating at a loss. We learned later that it was probably going to be shut down soon. It was at a big dam, so there was a lake, which was cool to look at, it was werid to see water. The landscape is very cool in the south, think Mars+South Dakota. The next day we stayed at a community run campsite at the foot of a mountain. It wasn't much at all. Really just a toilet, and couple places to put tents and make fires. We climbed around the mountain though (couldn't go all the way up, because there was a sheer face near the top), which was fun and very beautiful. The next day, we visited a school in community that ran the campsite, and it was really nice to just be able to hang out with some kids. One of their teachers helps run the campsite and he told us that they only make a few bucks a month beyond what it costs to pay the one employee, the guard at the gate, so it's very difficult for them to make any improvements. The last night we stayed at a beautiful lodge, taht had some campsites attached to it. It was part of a group that basically runs private versions of national parks for profit. They guy who spoke to us there had a lot of interesting things to say about conservation and the tourism industry, the jist of which that private companies are better at conservation than the government, because they can make it so that the profit drives the conservation and vice versa. Overall the trip was a great time, and a good recharge. We got to relax in nature a lot--the last night I took a walk by myself around the area underneath the stars, and it was absolutely amazing--and we learned a little bit too, which was a plus
We got back and got right back into the swing of things. Last week I had one pretty tough day at my internship, and one amazing day. Monday I had second grade and they were just totally wild, and I had a very tough time controlling them. I left pretty frustrated and pretty dejected about my abilities as an educator. But on Wednesday, instead of working with a whole class I took out one third grader who's very bright but doesn't really do well in a large classroom setting. Like all of the kids, he's got a lot of really tough things going on at home and in the community, so he's angry a lot and requires a lot of attention. I imagine in school he sort of gets left behind, because teachers don't do well with that sort of thing. They probably just hit him with a ruler until he appears to be paying attention. He didn't want to be separated from the class at first, but once we got into things we did great. We were working on multiplication, until got a little bored of that, but then he asked me if I could teach him long division. And I did. It was great! On and off, throughout the first half of the day, which was math time, he would want to go back to the classroom, but after break he was really excited to come back and work with me some more. I had him read O The Places You'll Go. I'm not sure he really got it, I'd forgotten how abstract it was, but there are some tough words in there, and he did well with those, and he seemed to enjoy it. Working with him was really rewarding, and I think he got a lot out of it too. It made me realize that my strengths when it comes to teaching are in small groups or individually.
Friday in Development class we vistied a really nice private hospital and the Katutura State hospital, which is public and in the middle of the black neighborhood. It was hard to believe we were in the same country. The private hospital seemed nicer than Evanston Hospital, while the Katutura hospital (which I'd been to before when my sister was sick on my urban homestay) was exactly what you'd think of when you think of a hospital in a developing nation. Really crowded, paint peeling off the walls, I stepped on a cockroach. In the wards there were only big rooms, 8 beds, with people suffereing from all kinds of things. The rooms are pretty open, too, big glass windows facing the corridors, no privacy, no real place for visitors to sit. Comparing that to the nice, furnished rooms in the private hospitals, with no more than 3 people, and as few as just one, was remarkable. As was comparing the maternity ward. It was really hard to see this blatant imbalance, especially when it comes to something as important as healthcare. I've got some more thoughts on this, but I'll just leave it there for now. Ask me if you're interested.
I've spent the past few days procrastinating a paper that's due today. It's due at 5, but I have to go to my internship in the afternoon, so it's really due by about noon, when I have to leave. The prompt was to talk about two issues in development and how they affect each other. I was originally going to do education and unemployment, but for religion class this past week we talked about the Church's response to AIDS, and there was a lot of really interesting stuff there, so I decided to write on the Church's response to AIDS, and some of its shortcomings especially in terms of stigmatization, and then how AIDS is in turn forcing the church to change its rhetoric and becoming more of a healing society. We needed primary research, so I talked to that itneresting woman who I talked about from Development class two weeks ago, the one who was very critical of the church, and also to the head of the health wing at the Council of Churches in Namibia, who spoke to our class on Wednesday. I was fascinated by how much what they had to say was similar. Their only major difference was that the CCN guy thought that it was not the Church's place to discuss premarital sex and condom use outside of marriage, and Rosa thought that that was an "excuse." They came at the issue from very different angles, obviously, but both talked about the need for the Church to change its rhetoric, for them to improve education of pastors about AIDS, etc. So that was pretty cool. The paper is turning out better than I thought it would, which is good. As usual, I'm pulling my shit together at crunch time.
Speaking of which, it really is crunch time, so I need to go finish this paper.
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