My Trip To Namibia; or, I Drank The Water And Lived To Write The Blog Post

I just got home from my week-and-a-half long sojourn in Namibia, a "developing" country in southern Africa. I was visiting my sister who lives and works there as a primary school teacher. Man, what a ride.



The flight from New Hampshire to Windhoek (the capital and largest city of Namibia) took about 24 hours spread over two and a half days. I can't sleep on airplanes or in airports, so I got to the lodge drunk with fatigue. A state, by the way, excellent for your first hours of driving on the left side of the road and navigating an unfamiliar city and country.



English is a foreign language for Namibians, though it is the official language of the country. They won their independence from South Africa not even two decades ago now, and they chose English to be the official language because it was politically neutral. The form of English they do speak, though, is more akin to the British variety than the American variety ("gas" is "petrol", "trucks" are "lorries", etc).

It is odd to realize that you're the one with the strange accent.

My sister managed to effect an accent she called "Namlish". It was not quite the local accent, but it was local enough to make it easier for her to be understood. They use "must" as Americans would use "should" or "ought to". They use "clever" as we use "smart". They use present progressive tense to confer a state of being instead of a temporal action ("We are having no money" instead of "We have no money".) And many words are monophthongized ("no" is pronounced closer to /nɔː/ instead of /noʊ/). "It is true" is said a lot as Americans might say "really".

No, really!

I tried to mimic this a little bit, but the 7th graders in the class I taught still looked at me like I was speaking Klingon.

I also took a 5th-grade class in Khoekhoegowab, the native language of the Damara. It has nasalization and clicks, which English does not generally use semantically. My attempt to pronounce sentences was met with laughter from the rest of the class. However, the language appears to be largely isolating, like English, with a low morpheme-to-word ratio and a few bounded morphemes to convey semantics. Like English. Word order plays a heavy role in meaning. In that respect, it is a simple language for an English speaker to learn, but not to speak.

When I was walking home from school one day, I was followed by a group of girls who didn't seem to speak English. They held their hands up to their eyes. It wasn't until they pointed to the camera on my belt that I understood: they wanted me to take their picture. And promptly following, they wanted to look at their picture. This was a famously popular occupation among the children of the town (and the drunk men). Most of my thousand or so pictures are of random kids throwing gang signs to the camera.



Before I went, people warned me about traveling to a developing country. Common admonitions were to carry a travel wallet to hide my money from theft, to pretend I was Canadian to minimize anti-Americanism, and to avoid the tap water.

I didn't carry a travel wallet. In fact, I felt remarkably safe in most places. The primary dangers I faced seemed to be venomous snakes and a corresponding weak medical infrastructure to care for snake bites; drunk drivers; and other tourists.

Heavy taxes and a culture of weak property rights discourages industry and hard work. Not just in Namibia, but everywhere. But Namibians know that any money they make will simply be taxed away from them, and any money they save will simply be mooched by friends and family. So they have little incentive to do more than the bare minimum. Nevertheless, they do seem to prefer entrepreneurship in the form of carving Makalani nuts with your name on them and selling them to white folk for obscene prices.

Be very careful when loitering. A stranger that asks your name will have it carved into a nut before you realize it.

And I didn't pretend I was Canadian. Everyone assumed I was South African or German (or French or British). And when they found out my true nationality, they were more interested in Barack Obama and California than whatever nonsense the Federal Government is up to today.

It was a fantastic trip. My sister was an excellent tour guide and hostess. The locals I met were friendly and rude and entertaining and bored and curious. Just like humans are everywhere. The desert landscape has a dangerous beauty to it; it gets to you in an odd way. Driving on the left side of the road seems more natural, which is odd considering only about 25% of the world does it. I think it's how the brain works or something, driving being a right-brain activity. I don't really know.



I definitely recommend visiting if you have a vacation coming up. Plan to visit all the countries in the Southern African Development Community. Things are cheap, tourism is well-developed, its safe, and it is gorgeous territory.

And yes, I drank tap water in all the various cities and towns I visited, and I didn't get sick.

It is true.