End of Week One: ICT and VSO (Thurs 10th Sept 2009)
on Susan Somers (Namibia), 20/Sep/2009 19:12, 34 days ago
I arrived in Windhoek (via London and Jo’burg) last Sunday afternoon, after over 24 hours of travelling but thankfully with all my baggage. It’s a smallish city seemingly slap bang in the middle of a semi arid desert of bushes, scrub and sandy coloured dry grass. We were brought to temporary accommodation (which is very nice; a flat shared with three Dutch girls but I’ve my own room) where we will stay during the next few days of ICT (that’s In-Country Training: VSO love their acronyms!) There are 17 of us ‘new volunteers’ - us 4 girls, 2 guys and 5 couples (3 with children)The training has been good (especially in that it gives us a chance to acclimatise, meet other volunteers and get some basic information about living and working in Namibia) but sometimes boring (some of the sessions were not great or badly organised– especially the language training)We did one particularly good exercise in which we were dropped off in Katutura (a very poor, predominately black suburb, north west of the city) with a list of 3 community groups to visit and find out about. Until this point, we could have been forgiven for thinking that we were in a first world city, let alone a second world / developing one. The area where our accommodation and the VSO offices are, are nice, clean, well developed suburbs. In Katutura we were quickly reminded that although Namibia is quite high on the list of developing countries (according to GNP type scales) there is a huge amount of abject poverty. Although there some rich and quite a few people who are very comfortable the majority of people are very, very disadvantaged. In fact we were later told that Namibia is one of the world’s most unequal countries in the world, where 5% of the population own 95% of the wealth.We also had a chance to socialize during the week too; dinner at Joe’s Beer House on Sunday night (I ate some zebra, kudu, ostrich and springbok )a pizza lunch with other Windhoek based Volunteers on Monday, dinner in a Cameroon Restaurant on Wednesday night and an afternoon braai (bbq) to finish off today. It was also nice to cook dinner (well i ate and washed up) hang out and watch a movie with my flatmates on the other nights.