Elizabeth's Adventures In Namibia
Elizabeth's Adventures In Namibia
Journal Entry:
October 24, 1999 (The day I left for the Peace Corps) . Well, here is the starting point of my dream come true! My family has filled me with love to the point of overflowing. Friends have been so supportive and wonderful. I feel like the luckiest person on Earth. I just want to give as much as I've received!
Journal Entry:
January 25, 2000 “The girls from next door came over again to play the number game that J and D sent to me. I love how they watch for me after school. As soon as I leave the school compound and walk down the road, I hear them yelling in unison"E-liz-a-beth! E-liz-a-beth!" and they run to hug me. I've realized that when they come over or ask to play cards, they are actually just asking for my time; to pay attention to them! I found out that the four of them live in one house with 8 other children and one elderly woman! I don't think that they are from the same family. I'm still wondering where their parents are. I'm happy that they feel comfortable with me though. That's one thing that I definitely can do here is to love the children and make them feel important! Hopefully, they can get started down a good road here they feel good and respect themselves. Especially the girls!
My First Hiking Experience:
After 6 weeks of being shuttled from town to town in our Peace Corps “combies,” vans, I wanted to hitch hike to the big capital! How does it work? Where do I go? Who do I ask? How much will it cost? All of these questions and more flittered through my brain. Most of all, I kept asking “How safe is this really??”
Together, my friends, Sarah and Andria, and I begged one of our trainers to show us the ropes. She had just finished her service and knew exactly how hiking in Namibia worked after two years of sitting by roadsides! We walked to a Petrol station and the three of us PCTs (Peace Corps Trainees) sat and watched in awe. It turned out, after all our concerns and fears, that it’s a lot easier than we imagined. It turns out that the license plates end in the letter of your hometown. That means that you can find cars that, most likely, are going your way. You just start walking up to them and ask if you can have a ride! Easy as that! Sometimes you can ask the fillers working at the station to keep a look out for cars going your way. They’ll arrange rides for a small tipping fee! In a town, it’s as easy as that! It usually costs $N10 ($1.25 USD) from our training site in Okahandja to the capital, Windhoek.
We found a hike going to Windhoek and climbed into the back of the “backie”, truck. The open back gave us a stunning view of Namibia flying by us at 180 km/hr. So, there we were, huddled together in the back of an open backie, watching the mountains, wide open plains with savanna grass, the Acacia trees, the wild animals in the morning light. I felt a lot of excitement in hiking. It all came crashing down on my mind…I was in AFRICA! I was HIKING in AFRICA! I was WATCHING the WILDLIFE while HIKING in AFRICA! I wondered at the strange twists that life can give us and at how we can end up on roads that we never imagined. Above all, I wished that I could have shared the freedom and the beauty of the land with everyone I knew.
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