By Amanda
Maisel & Cole Chernushin
Asphalt cools as the sun sets over a horizon of drought-stricken mopane and two
young men walk side by side back to where they will rest tonight. Each boy’s
sneakers kick the same rocks and carry the same dirt in each rubber crevice.
For the moment, they tread on equal footing. Throughout the day, the road they
travel bustles with cars of all kinds whisking travelers to and from town and
other destinations. Tonight, this road hosts the easy sighs, the gentle breeze,
and a collision of two radically different worlds. Tonight, it provides a place
for meeting, understanding, and change. Throughout the course of a week spent
on our rural home stay, this road both literally and figuratively connected
each of our experiences with our host families.
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Three of our host Oumas (grandmas) at Pastor Oumas Lucia’s church service
Sunday morning on one of the farms
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On our rural home stays in Khorixas,
each of us was afforded the unique opportunity to become totally immersed in
the everyday life of a family whom, in all likelihood, we would otherwise have
never had the chance to meet [1]. Living as a part of a family and learning about
the way our host parents and siblings lived day to day allowed us to challenge
many of our misconceptions about the universality of our own experiences and
norms. While tokens of familiarity like the cell phone my Ouma (grandma) used
to check in with Center for Global Education reminded me that the culture on
the farm did not exist in isolation from my own in the United States, while
other everyday occurrences like herding goats and shooing chickens out of the
bedroom allowed me to see how what I considered as “normal” was completely
arbitrary and particular to my own experience.
Being aware of our own cultures, we were each able to experience someone else’s
fully and without mediation. This was what was uniquely rewarding for many of
us; as opposed to learning about cultural norms as relics of history or as
pesky impediments to “modern western development,” we were able to experience
the values and practices of our families as a new set of norms to engage,
celebrate, and ultimately be enriched by. This aspect of the home stay was also
one of the most meaningful for the families themselves. On one occasion, as my
host Ouma preached to a small congregation composed of other families from
farms near by, she expressed her gratitude that we and other students in the
past had chosen to come and stay with families in order to learn from them; she
explained that in the past—pre-independence, under apartheid—it would have been
unheard of that a group of students from America would chose to come to her
home and want to learn about her language and religion, or even about simple
things like the every day workings of the farm. For both the families and us,
although we were coming from completely different intersections of experience,
it was essential that we were meeting on a level plain. We were there to learn
from our families in earnest without being blind to some of the real problems
facing the region where they lived, but also without being blind to our own
often invisible and distorting impositions of values and preferences.
Being on the farms and committing ourselves to learning from our families
allowed many of us to make some important realizations about our prior
expectations regarding development in the region. For many of us, the idea of
staying on a farm without electricity or internal plumbing read at first as a
kind of deprivation. While many of us struggled at first with new ways of
cooking, going to the bathroom, keeping things cool in the midday sun, or
taking a bath, it soon became clear that our families’ had their own very
effective ways of accomplishing all these tasks, regardless of the absence of
electricity and plumbing. While we would not be so bold as to leap to the
conclusion that nobody on our farms would prefer to have a flushable toilet or
an overhead light, we also realized the falseness of our original
preconceptions that everyone on the farms would feel deprived of such things.
When we spoke to the Regional Councilor of the Kunene Region where Khorixas is located, we heard a great deal about rural electrification
projects and how many toilets had been installed that year [2]. With this
information came the idea that those projects were the most needed and desired
amongst the communities we were visiting. However, as our home stays went on it
became clear that what we saw as a deprivation in need of development projects
-like toilet installation- was merely the projection of our own preference, and
that in reality the communities we lived among had different needs and
priorities than we were immediately able to perceive. My host siblings and Ouma
did not seem to see cooking over an open fire or using the water from the
outdoor tap as a problem, and even visiting relatives from cities like Windhoek
seemed, with few exceptions, to enjoy returning to this mode of living in which
they had grown up. Upon talking to my family more and more it became clear that
for many of them living without these things was a preference and not deprivation. It also became obvious that the clear downside to living far out
on the farms, more so than any other one factor, was not limited access to
electricity or plumbing, but to education.
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| (l-r) Cole, Moses (Cole’s home stay brother), Rebecca, Amanda, Robert (Melissa’s home stay), and Melissa dressed in traditional Herero and Damara style at Ouma Lucia’s church |
Though many of our home stay siblings were the same age as us, only a handful
held secondary school diplomas, and some expressed how this fact had limited their
career opportunities in the context of an increasingly encroaching globalized
economy that often necessitates supplementary incomes to keep rural farms
running. Given the current state of the Namibian economy, lacking such
educational tools results in a severe lack of opportunity for many residents of
the farmsteads. Many extended family members supplement their family’s income
through work in Swakopmund, Walvis Bay, or Windhoek. However, lack of prior
education limits their job opportunities to low wage work or none at all. Thus
the limited access to education in the region perpetuates cycles of migration
into urban areas with slim chances of real economic empowerment. The glaring
gaps in access to education made us wonder if the region should focus more
attention on building schoolhouses than on installing toilets.
After our week together, we were able to gain a more in depth perspective on
the disparities between a community’s actual needs as opposed to those we
project or assume exist. The road we all travel along as a global society often
seems to the naked eye to be broken by borders. Walking side by side, for no
matter how long grants individuals from distant lands, different languages, and
unique customs the ability to communicate. Without such communication,
establishing a global community could easily become a matter of imposition
rather than productive dialogue.
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