Atypical Friday

While I am certainly not going in the correct order in writing these blogs, I'm going to talk a bit about my adventures yesterday (Friday).. and then eventually about my homestay experience.

I went to work at my internship at 8am and worked on calculating some data for the annual human rights report that will be coming out in a few months-- this report is sent to the UN and other organizations as a shadow report. I also went to water the garden, which I have been doing on a daily basis, in hopes that it start growing some more plants (seeds may be required however).

Aside from working a newsletter to be printed in a few weeks, I am also progressively working on a photo project so that the office can have some pictures from Namibia (both landscapes and people) on the walls.

The reason for this blog is that I decided to go take pictures, and a friend of mine has her friend visiting form the states, so they invited me to go outside of Windhoek to see the terrain... We drove in a big 4x4 for about half an hour, partly on paved roads, partly on gravel.

The land is hilly and mountainous, lots of rock and cacti, some other small trees. The wildlife that we saw included 1 donkey, about 8 coys, 1 deer-looking animal, and wasps as large as my pinky finger.

We went to a vacated house which was covered in graffiti and remnants of past visitors, but still gorgeous. We sat on the "porch", really a cement slab, ate our sandwiches, fruit, drank our Windhoek Lagers and peach ice tea, and soaked up the sun.

The house was likely a white farmer's house, judging by the size, location, and architecture. I have never seen a house so empty, broken, or beautiful.

All of the windows were gone, along with the doors, and all furniture.

Stable enough to walk around in, but not enough that you'd want to be there for a long time. After two hours of exchanging stories of learning to ski in the alps (my new Namibian friend) with his florescent colored spandex and foot-long dreads, or about the pornographic writings on the walls of this house, we all climbed back into the car and into reality.

The whole CGE spent our evening at Cafe Sol watching the Spain-Chile football match.

My time in Namibia is already going far too quickly, I have almost been here a MONTH.