What a great week!
I am back now in Windhoek after spending a week teaching in the location in Rehoboth. A location is the equivalent of a township in South Africa, and where black people were forced to live during the apartheid era in Namibia. The past week has been such a stark contrast to my first week in Windhoek. I stayed with a wonderful host family. The father was the principal of the location primary school. They had 2 children themselves, but there always seemed to be at least 6 kids running around the house! I'm learning to expand my definition of family here. Cousins are considered as brothers and sisters. It's also more correct to ask how many children to your mother and how many children to your father.
The girls in the house were absolutely fascinated by my body! It was really funny to see what parts of me they were most interested in - my hair in particular. Actually, this seemed to be a general rule for most of the children we met. The kids couldn't get over how much arm, leg, and chest hair the male volunteers had!
Teaching was a really great experience for me. I was teaching the oldest group, who were between ages 13-20. I was wonderfully impressed by how eloquent and smart they were. Although, the girls in particular speak very, very softly in class - a lot of the time I had to almost sit on the desks to hear what they were saying! In addition to teaching English grammar, I also did two days of HIV/AIDS education. Although this was my favourite part of the teaching week, it was also probably the toughest part as well. It was really difficult for me to remain neutral in the face of the gender double standards (that exist the world over I am sure) and blatant myths that I heard. One of the most prevalent HIV/AIDS myths is that having sex with a virgin will cure HIV/AIDS. It was also hard to listen to some of the boys who insisted that having multiple partners was fine and that condoms didn't work anyway. In addition, they also declared that they wanted to marry virgins!
Aside from some really interesting teaching experiences, I also finally stopped being vegetarian - it was only a matter of time in a country where one of the mainstays of the economy is cattle raising!
I also made my first trip to the hospital! One of my toes ended up getting really infected and I had to go get it sliced open and drained! I am now hobbling around in one of Pete's (huge) flip flops since my bandaged foot will not fit into anything else!
I am back now in Windhoek after spending a week teaching in the location in Rehoboth. A location is the equivalent of a township in South Africa, and where black people were forced to live during the apartheid era in Namibia. The past week has been such a stark contrast to my first week in Windhoek. I stayed with a wonderful host family. The father was the principal of the location primary school. They had 2 children themselves, but there always seemed to be at least 6 kids running around the house! I'm learning to expand my definition of family here. Cousins are considered as brothers and sisters. It's also more correct to ask how many children to your mother and how many children to your father.
The girls in the house were absolutely fascinated by my body! It was really funny to see what parts of me they were most interested in - my hair in particular. Actually, this seemed to be a general rule for most of the children we met. The kids couldn't get over how much arm, leg, and chest hair the male volunteers had!
Teaching was a really great experience for me. I was teaching the oldest group, who were between ages 13-20. I was wonderfully impressed by how eloquent and smart they were. Although, the girls in particular speak very, very softly in class - a lot of the time I had to almost sit on the desks to hear what they were saying! In addition to teaching English grammar, I also did two days of HIV/AIDS education. Although this was my favourite part of the teaching week, it was also probably the toughest part as well. It was really difficult for me to remain neutral in the face of the gender double standards (that exist the world over I am sure) and blatant myths that I heard. One of the most prevalent HIV/AIDS myths is that having sex with a virgin will cure HIV/AIDS. It was also hard to listen to some of the boys who insisted that having multiple partners was fine and that condoms didn't work anyway. In addition, they also declared that they wanted to marry virgins!
Aside from some really interesting teaching experiences, I also finally stopped being vegetarian - it was only a matter of time in a country where one of the mainstays of the economy is cattle raising!
I also made my first trip to the hospital! One of my toes ended up getting really infected and I had to go get it sliced open and drained! I am now hobbling around in one of Pete's (huge) flip flops since my bandaged foot will not fit into anything else!
posted by Sinéad at 8:10 AM
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