The educational tour (email from Amy)

Sorry I haven't written in a while. This weekend was the educational tour to Etosha. We thought that we were going to have to travel in the back of three bakkies (pick-up trucks) but the day before we found out that we had procured a bus. The bus was big enough (unlike the one last year) but it was on its last legs (which here means that it will probably be half-repaired and limp on for another dozen years or so.) Every time we stopped, started, turned, or accelerated it would backfire and lurch into place, throwing people and luggage in every direction. There was also a ten cent coin stuck in the horn that completed a circuit, so every now and then we'd have 30 seconds to a minute of solid honking. Before we could leave Etosha we had to hunt down a fan belt because, apparently, we had been driving with a terribly threadbare one. Plus it didn't help that every time we moved the driver ground the gears something terrible. I am not entirely certain that he ever actually used the clutch.

As to the food situation-it was rather ordinary for here. We left with a goat carcass, 12 cabbages, 30 loaves of bread, a case of margarine, plus a large bag of rice, so the kids were eating mostly rice, cabbage soup, and lots of margarine sandwiches. The teachers, however, brought extra "good" food (i.e. strange meat) to supplement the diet. Perhaps you have never been in a situation where you were unable to refuse a pickled fish sandwich for breakfast, but, trust me, I'm speaking from experience her, you start eying the kid's plain margarine and jam sandwiches with more than a little envy.

There is nothing quite so culture-shocking as Etosha with village kids. Etosha is very touristy and fancy. One of my kids pointed out a two story house with astonishment and told me that he would never stay in a house like that because he was afraid he would fall off and die. Stairs aren't necessary in a place with ridiculously low population density. Even in Outjo, the nearest large city, there are only a few buildings with two stories. Almost everyone in Etosha dresses in khaki on khaki with a large camera on a neck strap and a German accent. They eyed my kids with just about as much curiosity as my kids eyed them.

My kids were separated by the gulf of their poverty and naivete about the world outside the village just as the tourists were separated by their wealth and their ignorance about the realities of life in Namibia. They cannot conceive of each other's worlds. Both of them are stuck just looking at each other. We hold apartheid in our hearts- black from white, rich from poor, young from old, Western from African- all of these are small potatoes compared with the true isolation- me from everyone else. We are stuck in the provincial homelands of our own heads. People ask me sometimes why apartheid is still a problem 17 years after it ended. To me it's not strange that it's still a problem, to me it's a miracle that it's not more of a problem, bridging, as we are, the bottomless abysses that separate us, one from another, with the toothpick and dental floss bridges of our own resources.

As for my plans after the Peace Corps, I think that I will not be home for Christmas (you can't count on me.) I will be doing a little traveling with some friends. Right now the plan is to go to Victoria Falls, then Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Zanzibar, Kenya, and take a plane from Nairobi to Cairo, a little while in Egypt and then probably home. Just a little jaunt through Africa. I'm going to try to do it on some limited resources, so it'll probably be a bit of an adventure. I'm hoping that I don't run out of money and end up living on 20 cents worth of bread in Cairo or Bucharest or something, but (to comfort my parents and grandparents and all the rest of you who worry when I say stuff like that) I'm pretty clever and I have young, tough bones. I can survive a lot. I'll be going with friends, as I said, so I'll be pretty safe and, particularly, I'm going with a guy to Egypt, which is nice because it's hard to go to Egypt alone as a woman. Anyway, I'll let you know more as I know more.

As for the reading update- Read Collapse by Jared Diamond over the holiday (very good- not quite as good as Guns Germs and Steel, but few things are really paradigm shifting like that book was and still definitely worth a good thorough read), also almost finished Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky (very dense, but very good), and I'm halfway through Middlemarch. I haven't really been reading as much lately, but I'm hoping to change that.

Anyway, That's the good word from this corner of the world. Hope everyone in that neck of the woods is doing fantastic.