Catch up on our escapades over the month of November in our new newsletter. Click the picture to open a copy.
The previous newsletters should be available by following the links to the side.
If you haven't received the newsletter by email, and you would like to, then please email us and let us know.
Having met Luke at the Thanksgiving dinner, we bumped into him again at the "OK" supermarket and had a cup of coffee with him. Since he is with Peace Corps (and therefore isn't allowed to drive) and being very curious people, we gave him a lift back to the school where he has been working for the last two years.
Orumahane school is about 30km outside of Opuwo and has had Peace Corps working there for a few years now. They have no water supply to the school but have about 500 children who stay there. Recently the school made the papers as the hostel was voted best in the region- rather sad when you see where they are sleeping.....
The accommodation is very basic. The picture shows the dorms where the kids sleep. There is a shortage of mattresses and most of the kids will end up sharing beds, or sleeping on the metal frames..
The picture to the left is of the dining hall, where the kids get four meals a day (although most of these meals are just bread).
We'll possibly mention a bit more about this visit in our monthly newsletter, but the classes have about 40 kids in them. Luke teaches grades 9 & 10 and has kids whose ages range from about 13 up to 25.
We joined about 27 people on Friday night (Peace Corps, VSO, AIM, etc) to share Thanksgiving at a lodge just outside of town. A very nice, but very remote, location with fantastic food, brought up from Windhoek especially for the occasion - turkey, cranberry sauce, all rounded off with ice cream!
The two Canadians, Steve (left) and Evan, arrived last Wednesday and we finally got to meet them at church on Sunday. Both are from Briarcrest college (somewhere in the middle of Canada), and they are here for six months to work with Every Home for Christ, through AIM, in their outreach programmes to the himba villages and in the schools. I think they will also help out in the church as well. Their first outreach trip started on Monday and they are heading out until Friday - sleeping under the stars and working through some of the villages beyond Opuwo.
They have only just arrived and were asked to preach on Sunday!
Last 
Sunday night, and we had just spent some time with the Canadians. Helen had been called down to the hospital to see a patient and I walked the Canadians back to their house. We were watching the lightning over the hills in the distance when a dust cloud hit, kicked up by the rains, and I had to run back to the hospital as the rain started soon after.
At the hospital, Helen was just finishing with a patient and I was trying to get a goat out of the ward. The rain was, by this stage, torrential and the lightning was close - with flashes every 3-4 seconds. To get to the house we had no choice but to run through about 200m of open ground up the hill.
We ran up the hill, through the rivers of water coming down the road, halfway up our shins, trying not to think of the snakes and scorpions, of the flashes of lightning, or that we were soaked to the bone
And when we arrived at the house, we had left the windows open to cool the house so the floor was soaking, and then the power lines were hit and the electricity went down.
These photos were taken the morning after.
Yesterday was a big day for Helen. With the absence of Dr Bwalya, Helen was asked to stand in as the acting PMO for the hospital. Yes, she was responsible for the entire hospital. So on top of her normal clinical duties, she had the administrative work too and the added responsibility of having to know what was going on in all the wards, OPD and Casualty - but she did get her own office (with air-conditioning) and her own secretary.
I came back through the hospital at lunchtime, however, and wondered whether there had been some sort of uprising or a coup. Hundreds of people were congregating at the front of the hospital.
Nothing to worry about - the hospital were looking for a few new cleaners and had created a shortlist of 300 (!?) to interview for the positions.
We occasionally have mentioned that, when Helen is not on-call over the weekend and we are staying in Opuwo, we head up to the lodge for a swim.
This will let you see what kind of place it is. They take a lot of tourists on package deals, who come up to see the Himba, but they also let the volunteers in town (ourselves, VSO, Peace Corps, etc) come in to use the pool - as long as we buy something to drink.
It is on the top of the hill at the back of the town with views to the west so that you see some amazing sunsets from the pool area.
If you do plan to visit us, then you can stay at the lodge for between £70 - £100 / night.
What is an "R+R weekend" I hear you ask! For those not in the missionary-life know- "R+R" is rest and relaxation and something that AIM Namibia supports. One weekend a month you are encouraged to get away from the place where you have been posted, "time out" so to speak. So after working last weekend we took Friday off and headed north into Kaokoland, our destination- the Kunene River Lodge.
Well loved by volunteers from all over the northern region, the lodge was taken over by an English couple 2 years ago. Their daughter was working in Opuwo, no less, and on a visit out to see her they stayed at the lodge, fell in-love with it, and it just happened to be on the market!
We had borrowed a tent which we pitched right on the riverside with a view of Angola across the water.
The guys in the pictures were our neighbours for the weekend, and unlike my previous experience with the baboon (see earlier posts), we all stayed friends!
It was a wonderful, relaxing weekend and has given us a bit of a boost for the month ahead!
