How I stayed awake in Heathrow International...

I wanted to stay awake while we had a nine-hour layover in Heathrow International. Jenna and I decided to see who could write the best poem about how much Heathrow sucks (we went through there 3 times and NONE of them were good experiences). In any case, I decided to occupy my time in Heathrow by doing a film version of my poem. Please keep in mind this was done at about 3 in the morning.

Getting ready to come home.

It’s almost time to come home now, and our first blog made some pretty lofty statements about trying to find a more genuine version of how to live. Our goal was to find that more genuine way by living in community in Africa. What we’ve discovered is a lot of humility and the realization that I cannot fix the problem of poverty—not that Jenna or I had the intent of “fixing” anything, but that was a major discovery just the same. So did we achieve our goal? Have we thrashed away the husk of a more distorted version of Jenna or a less sparkly version of Bryan? Have we achieved some magical evolution of soul to make life better?

Yes and no.

Our perspective on the world has most definitely developed since we left Sioux Falls, and we have conclusively decided that it is larger and more intense than we might have ever imagined. As for us individually, I think there needs to be a lot of reflection and time for it to really sink in: Bryan is no more sparkly than when he left (although Jenna has developed a glow we’re a little concerned about) and there have been no mystical moments of enlightenment, BUT the aim of this trip was never to force God to climb down from heaven and give us a seminar on how to “live it up” or buff away our scars. What has been the best part of this trip is getting to see the day to day lives of these people living in Katatura. Seeing not just the scars of a group of people, but how they exist. (I know it shouldn’t be shocking, but it was still surprising to go through the tin-shack village and see daily life carrying on.)

What has been the greatest part about this trip is getting to know the PEOPLE behind those scars, instead of just naming them “boy in squatter camp,” or “AIDS orphan who lives in fear and abuse.” Life goes on, despite what I might see as outrageous circumstances. What has been the hardest lesson of this trip is to learn that there is no balm to heal those scars that I can offer. We could come in and help out in the tutoring room, teach them lessons about math or history or even literature, and live with them for a time in unconditional love… but those scars will still be there.

Maybe another student’s story can better illustrate how you’d want to just “fix” the problem: Paul was one of the fist kids that really stuck to Jenna even the first day we were there. He loves soccer and he’s talented, especially for a bean-pole third grader who could be blown over by a mighty wind. His snaggle-toothed smile is a permanent fixture on his face. It’s like no trouble is weighing him down when he’s in that haggard, dusty play space where Community Hope takes their break.

We really loved playing soccer with him that first day, and he would be in his own little Paul-world when he was juggling that soccer ball, and then kick it back like a dog who spits out the ball with electric expectation that you’ll throw the ball again. The second day we were observing classes and didn’t get out to break-time. Paul caught us after school and asked us why we weren’t there to play soccer with him, which is a really easy question to answer, but impossible to justify to the snaggle-tooth bean-pole who really only needs someone to kick a ball around to set him back into his own little Paul-world. Day three, Jenna and I reminded each other that we need to go out for break because Paul will be waiting, and sure enough he was waiting for us with a half-inflated, totally tarnished soccer ball (if he had a tail, it would be wildly thrashing in anticipation).

Before we left for home on that third day, Paul ran up to us in the school hall with a card addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Aukermans saying he likes playing soccer and that he loves us. How can you do anything to respond to that but make for certain you can keep kicking around the tarnished, half-inflated soccer ball? At the end of the week, Suzanne was driving us home and asked how the first week had been and we bring up Paul.

Suzanne helped us better understand what life is like for Paul at home. Paul has a couple younger siblings and lived at home with his mom who was a severe alcoholic and consequently a negligent mother. Paul’s grandmother was an active part of her grandkids kids’ life with the encouragement of the school, Paul and his siblings lived with grandma for a while, but Paul’s love for his mom made it very difficult to keep them separated. According to Suzanne, Paul sees his mom as the salt of the earth and no matter how abusively neglectful she is, he still loves her. No matter how much she drinks and becomes a different person, he loves her. How do you explain to a third-grader he deserves better than his abusive, alcoholic mother?

That’s what I mean by we can teach these kids, we can love these kids, but we cannot be Paul’s mom—that is a scar that simply cannot be taken away—more importantly, it is one aspect of Paul’s life, and not his entire existence. Could I steal Paul away and take him in as my own and in that sense be Paul’s parent and play soccer with him until I only have nothing but nubs for feet? Yes. But can I fill that space that his mom occupies in the scars he has? No. Paul’s got a lot more heart than I do in that unconditional love for his mother and I think he’ll do a lot to bring his mom back to earth from wherever she is right now, today, but that’s one situation of the 89 kids at Community Hope that don’t need a foreign, unfamiliar, American face to swoop in and save the day. I’ve had a hard time coming to that conclusion, and I’m still not sure I’m comfortable with it or agree with it, but it’s one thing I feel more strongly about than I could have before I was there. Another school story might illustrate this better than I can put into words.

Theodore reminded me (Bryan) a lot of myself, a younger African version. Quick to make a joke out of whatever is going on, kind of lippy, and really had a hard time spelling. He was in tutoring every day because the sounds of words just did not make sense in how they were spelled, and it was clearly frustrating him. Because he was getting testy and bored, and he really just doesn’t care about spelling, he preferred to give his teacher a hard time.

“Say ancient, Theodore.” His teacher would try to coach him.
“Aunkshint, Teodoor.” He would respond, with a smirk that you can’t help but laugh about, even though, as a teacher, you know you shouldn’t.
“No no no, you’re not paying attention to the vowels, that’s why you’re having a hard time spelling. Now listen to the vowel sounds.” His tutoring instructor, David, is patient with him. “Ang-cee-ent.”
“Aunk-shee-eent” He truly was trying now. Theodore and David have a strong relationship, and when David wants him to get to it, Theodore wants to try to please David.
“No, you’re saying ‘eent’ not ‘ent.’ It’s with an ‘E’ not a double ‘E’.” Now David was getting frustrated. This was clearly a discussion they’d had before.
“No, I say eent, we say eent. You say it like America says it.” It just got real.
“Theodore, I’m trying to help you spell, and if you say it like you say it, you’ll keep spelling it wrong.” David handled at situation well, but even I could tell that David understood the weight of this little discussion.
“Why do I need to be like you, and speak like an American?”

As you read in Chris’s story, there’s a lot of shame in Damara culture and one nuance of Windhoek culture is “White is best, coloured is good, and black is… in Katatura.” With this in mind, Theodore’s question went deeper than a simple spelling lesson: Are we teaching these kids to speak with an American accent or are we taking away their Namibian accent? Yes, it really will help with some spelling issues… but the test that these kids take before they can get a Namibian certificate of graduation will be from a tape that has a heavy British English accent, which is familiar to neither Namblish (Namibian English) or American English ears. Speaking with American accents will bring a lot of ethnic baggage for these kids and brings them into a culture war that is currently being waged in Namibia.

So, is there absolutely no hope and only hardship that can come from outsider influence? Certainly not. Dave, Sandy, Adam, Sarah, and Maria love those kids in an amazing way that the students see every day, and it's clear that God has a plan for them there. But speaking for Jenna and I, we can only help the kids to an extent because those scars they have do not belong to us. We cannot share in the scars, we can only listen and love when it comes to that part of their lives. Those scars belong to a culture which is not ours.

As an outsider, it’s so easy to only see the hardships and differences, but the best thing that we can do is find the strengths of their own culture—namely their art and their extremely tightly knit social structure—and utilize that IN teaching them how to escape that cycle of poverty. The culture is not evil, the culture is actually quite beautiful in many aspects, but there is a very real danger of siphoning off that Namibian culture.

Theodore needs an educated Namibian role model to remove that hurdle of, “You are just a white person trying to change me.” That is a real feeling amongst many of the students (now, do keep in mind that this feeling is from angsty 5th and 6th graders who are just developmentally at a stage where SOMETHING has to be wrong with the people in authority). These kids need to visually see and emotionally be invested in positive role models who are living representatives of a healthy, educated Namibian with dignity otherwise the education is a foreign concept from a foreign person.

For this reason, Jenna and I are more wary of how we can best affect Community Hope. As much fun as it was fun to be Mr. and Mrs. Aukermans in Africa for a while, we feel like the greatest contribution we can make is to be sure that teachers like the Bandas and Mr. Gumbo can make it to school every day and have the resources they need to continue to be the face of a positive Namibian (or surrounding countries') culture. Those teachers will be the anchor that the kids can rely on, and they can be the bridge of information for them that I could never fill.

Jenna has brought up, a number of times, how funny it is that we were really ready to uproot and move to Namibia if it felt like that’s where we needed to be, and BOTH of us really feel like we could make a more lasting impact by being a support back in the states. We’re not confused or unsure about this decision, but it has taken us a few days to let that decision settle. It’s easy to feel like you’re running away from such a great opportunity. We’re looking forward to how we can continue to share these kids’ stories back at home, and how we can re-enter our community back at in Sioux Falls.

We’ll be home in two days, and can’t wait to land and be back! See you all very soon.

Chris has a rough day

Chris is a student that I got to work with a lot in the fourth grade. He has a unique home-life in that he has a father at home. When we were at the school, Chris had a number of very out-of-character outbursts of anger. David is one of his teachers and after Chris and another kid got into a physical scuffle (as much as 4th graders can scuffle), David asked if everything was going OK at home. Chris was just silent after David asked if things were OK at home. Then he started breathing heavily and started mumbling through tears and then talking faster and faster until David couldn’t understand him any more. What David could make out of Chris’s mumbling was that Chris’s dad tried to kill himself and Chris found his dad. One aspect of Namibian culture that is very hard is that it is a shame-based system. Failure is something that is to be avoided at all costs because the weak are pointed out at every opportunity.
In public school, there are tests throughout a student’s education: 4th grade, 8th grade, 10th grade, and 12th grade. Passing means you advance on to the next level but failure means that you failed school, permanently. There is no retaking the test, there is no starting over from the beginning. You’re simply a failure and will either work at a gas-pump for the rest of your life or simply be one of the 50% of black Namibians that is unemployed. Even if they find jobs, it’s usually at a low-level position. Regardless of how well they do at that position there are still demeaning signs at cash registers warning customers to “Demand a receipt and count your change.” Even the way people treat gas-pump attendants or grocery-store workers is as though they were ordering a dumb animal, rather than a capable human being. The underlying message is that this person is lesser than me and deserves no dignity. This is just a daily reality.
I didn’t ever hear why Chris’s dad tried to take his life, but Chris had a lot on his mind that day at school. How does a 4th grader think of their dad when he’s just given up on his family? How does a 4th grader see the world when a parent, their safety, just failed to kill himself? How does Chris feel about himself when his dad just quite on him?

One of the things I've heard people say really bothered me, and I couldn't quite get past it; they tried to tell me, “These people don’t value life here.” By "these people" they meant the black tribes. I think that’s a load of crap. I think “these people” are no less human than anybody else who has a father or mother or person that they care about. What’s different is that life is so much more transient. Life is less reliable. Can you imagine the cloud of depression that would smother this culture of people who have at least a 30% rate of HIV/ AIDS (not to mention the Meningitis epidemic that swept through Katatura while we were there or the Polio outbreak in Katatura the year before or the countless other diseases that plague people who are not educated on simple sanitation)? We have the luxury of not facing death at every illness, not having a steady rotation of neighbors because of this epidemic or that neighbor being raped and killed. We have the luxury of mourning. Can you imagine the inescapable shroud that death would cast on “these people” if they were forced to cope with death in the way that you and I do? So do “these people not value life?” Hell no. Chris was learning to deal with one of the darker aspects of death in the 4th grade, and that will give him a very different perspective on life, but that doesn’t mean he values it any less than you and I.
Living in poverty has a lot more weight to it than I could understand before I worked with Chris. It’s not just hunger, it’s not just shame, and it’s not as simple as putting the value of life at a higher or lower premium. Chris has a lot on his plate, so I’m just glad that he has a little more stability than the kids who don’t have a reliable adult, even if it’s only in the form of his teachers at school and that that school gives him a lot of positive support. Chris is very lucky to have a teacher like David who will let him be a kid and cry.

Jerry's story

As with anybody’s story, you need to understand the context in which a person is growing up. For most of these kids, they are born into the Damara tribe. In northern Namibia there are the traditional village styles and norms of this cultures living. In Windhoek, this was the case until the whites moved in. After a while of living in relative proximity to the Damara and other black tribes in the area, the whites relocated the various tribes into one large squatter-camp called Katatura. So to see it the way that these kids from Community Hope see it, when you look at the sea of tin shacks in these pictures, consider this living style less like urban poverty and more like an upgrade from the wood huts that their extended family might have up north along the Angola boarder. Damara culture is matriarchal. Not in the sense that the woman is the head of the house, rather, when a woman becomes pregnant it is most typical that the father does not stick around. So when this happens, it’s more like the woman IS the house. That being said, most kids at community hope don’t really have a father figure. Most kids in Katatura don’t really have a father figure.

Alright, so with that in mind, here’s the snapshot of the life of one of the students: Jerry (Jerry wasn’t at school every day while we were there, at least not on either day that we took the camera to Community Hope). Jerry is one of the oldest kids at Community Hope, and has been at the school since day 1. He is 15 and in the sixth grade. It’s not that he was ever held back or mentally delayed in any way, it’s just that when Community Hope began and offered him the opportunity of an education, he was a little older than the other 1st graders. Like I said, he doesn’t come to school every day and that’s because he doesn’t exactly have a supportive home life.

Jerry’s mom died of AIDS a while back, at least before Jerry started school at Community Hope. Because Jerry is like most kids in the area, and had no father to look to after Mom died, Jerry was now in the care of his older sister (we never met her). Like most kids in Katatura, Jerry’s older sister had not gotten an education nor had any means of learning any job skills but now had to car for Jerry and herself. Most girls in this situation turn to prostitution. Because of this, sence Jerry was a very young boy, he grew up in a brothel. Once Jerry was offered a place at Community Hope, there was a new possibility for this micro-family to get a grasp on day-to-day needs (if Jerry can get an education enough to get a job, maybe Sister doesn’t have to belong to a brothel… maybe there are options… maybe there are even options for Sister… you get the idea of an upward spiral of Hope). Jerry’s sister eventually asked if there were any classes she could take to work her way out of the situation she was in. It wouldn’t make sense to enroll her in elementary classes, but she was able to join with a group of women who currently work with another Y.W.A.M. organization (called Beautiful Kids) making some articles of clothing. It’s not enough to take care of all of their needs, but it does earn her enough so that she and Jerry could move out of the brothel.
Currently Jerry is in 6th grade, which is the oldest class of kids at Community Hope. Next year, the school will rent the last room available at the school’s current location. After that, they will need a new location for the school to spill into. Jerry’s a smart kid and is one of the more outspoken people at the school, which would only be expected of a person his age. He towers above the rest of the students at Community Hope (and even a few of the teachers) and really is a leader that the rest of the kids look to.

In Doolin. Cliffs of Moher are unreal. Beanz is better.

We've gotten a chance to rest up and take it easy for a day in Doolin. Evidently Guinness is good for a bad sore throught. With that in mind, last night we went to a pub for dinner and had Guinness and a stew that was a Guinness-beef-broth base, potatoes, and more beef. We're both feeling pretty good at this point. The scenery is increadible, and the B&B that Jenna found for us is a gem. These guys that run it are the real-deal when it comes to cooking, so breakfast was looking out on Shire-like farms of cobblestone fences with horses or sheep or cows, a surreal drizzle which has sun peeking under a thin layer of clouds, and that kind of food that just makes you giggle after you take a bite. Not too shabby.
All that being said, there is one thing that trumps it all. His name is Beanz.

He is a golden retreiver. He is one of my favorite animals. When we drove up to the B&B, I opened my cardoor and kicked my foot over the car door only to discover a very friendly snout poking almost in the car to say hello. That was Beanz. He ushered us into his house to check in. When we woke up this morning, Beans was laying in front of our door. He didn't move as we crept around him to go down for breakfast, but beat his tail on the ground to let us know he was glad we woke up and now needed to be pet. We abliged him, and so he followed us down stairs. When we got back from breakfast, he was again waiting at our door and again too tired to stir, except for his tail and very expressive eyebrows. After we gave Beanz a scratch, we opened our door and he snapped up with surprising speed and pranced into our room. Beans is one of our favorite animals in the world. We love you Beanz!

We're in Ireland!

We are officially in Ireland but we are both feeling a little under the weather. It's nothing serious, just some sore throat and fatigue sort of symptoms (Bryan thinks it's pretty much from little sleept+ lots of work+ foreign bacteria+ foreign climate= really tuckered out). Now that we're in Ireland, there is actually some humidity and comfort and plenty of Guiness. We landed today in London and it took more than an hour and a half to pass through customs and security but suprisingly we made our flight to Dublin. With all that said, please accept a few pictures in leu of a more detailed post, and tomorrow we'll get more written.

More classroom fun

Over the weekend the teacher that Bryan had been subbing for finally was able to pass through Zambia to get into Namibia. Ray is really a funny guy and it’s plain to tell that the kids really respect him, so it’s very good to have him back in the school community. The teachers still wanted a chance to see how to teach literature classes, so I (Bryan) continued to cover Pinocchio and The Apple and the Arrow (and no, I never shot and students… though Jenna did have to talk me out of trying to throw knives at them).
This Sunday (the 26th) is our sponsor child’s birthday, so we got to celebrate with the school yesterday.
Balbina is our sponsor child’s name, and when Jenna asked what she wanted for a birthday present she confidently said, “A horse!” I then asked her if it would be alright if we got her a unicorn instead. She had never heard of a unicorn. Jenna then proceeded to find a horse in a coloring book and spent copious hours making it beautiful. This horse happened to be in a coloring book detailing how the Vikings lived… so we ended up with a beautifully colored horse with a fierce Viking riding atop it (the Viking was left black and white to deemphasize him). I then took the drawing and put in a rainbow colored horn out of the horse’s forehead.
It was really fun teaching the Apple and the Arrow though. As we came into the school to start out the whole trip, the fifth and sixth grades are notorious for their bad behavior and poor performance. After about five minutes in the classroom with them, it was apparent that this was not just a rumor, but also painstakingly clear that these kids were just being age-appropriate and testing boundaries that they’d grown up with. What was fun about teaching the Apple and the Arrow with them was that they really were given a chance to act their age and read about a guy that pushed away bad authority. One kid, Alberto, was just a terror the first few days with the 5th/6th graders and really made the whole class get off track. Another was Theodore, who simply could not go five minutes without cracking some sort of joke (and usually a pretty good one, so it was hard not to give him positive feedback from it). Sharon was like the boss of them all, commanding attention at any time she deemed necessary. But the thing is, these kids just needed and outlet to move, talk, and lead the class. They took charge of discussions, if the questions were important to them, so when the book provides fodder to ask, “When is it OK to go against authority” they jumped at the chance to talk. Sharon could really sink her teeth into that, and Alberto would actually smile at me and give appropriate feedback (even do the stereotypical grunting and whining with his hand wriggling in the air like it might fall off to answer a question). And Theodore could joke about the characters in the book and provide some really good insight about why the characters could not agree. These kids are really bright, and I think they could provide some hope to the community around them to recognize how the city of Windhoek is really oppressive.
Again, we’ll talk to the Hunters today and see if we can provide a little more insight into who these kids are outside of class, so the next time we blog will be in Ireland and hopefully we can share a little about what life is like at home for these kids.