You can drive for hours without seeing anyone in
Namibia. A tumbleweed might literally
cross in front of your car. The capital
Windhoek, is surrounded by tall, sandy mountains making the horizon look like
Mars.
I was in Namibia for work.
Helping to run a workshop to adapt materials for our nationwide HIV
survey. Unfortunately this meant I saw
these mountains mostly from the window of my conference room. I insisted that even though it made the
projected materials a little harder to read, we have the windows open
every day.
Over lunches, I made friends
with Frida, a Namibian woman who worked at the Ministry of Health. One day at lunch, I bumped into a waiter and
said “lo siento”. Because I’m too old to
be juggling all these languages and random ones just pop out. (Most embarrassing is when I’m speaking to a
taxi driver in Africa and I start wagging my head like I’m in India. I’m confused.) Frida turned to me “Tu hablas espanol?!”
During the Namibian War of Independence, children were
smuggled out of the country to safety, many never to see their families
again. Frida’s boat went to Cuba. Not knowing a word of English or Spanish,
Frida and the other children spent the next 15 years growing up in Cuba.
“Most of us are now back in Namibia. Once a month we roast a big pig and dance
salsa all night long.”
Frida is trying to get into the University of Michigan for a Masters Program. I told her to
tell her story and she’d be a shoo in.
On Friday night we all went out to for Namibia’s famous beef
at Kapana. We ducked under the large
blue tarped area and pushed through the wall of smoke. In the center of the large outdoor market
were butchers using machetes to cut large pieces of the cow laid on the wooden
tables in front of them. The meat
was passed up front where men arranged
the pieces on open grills. The men
called at you to come and try their beef.
Theirs is the tenderest. I took a
few pieces from their hands, chewed, deliberated, and decided on the best
vendor.
I gave the man the equivalent of
5 dollars, and he chopped up a section for us and slid it to the bottom of the
grill. Then me, my friends and the smoke
stood around eating our pieces of the meat.
Large piles of salt, chile, and MSG were on pieces of cardboard next to
the grills for dippings. My coworker
handed me a plastic bottle cut in half with a sloshing brown liquid in it. “Dip it in this.” It was like eating raw garbage. He laughed.
Was cow bile.
After filled with beef and MSG, we sat in the back of the
tarped market on plastic chairs. A woman
dipped a ladle in a bucket of swamp water (?) and poured us each a glass. It was
a traditional fermented brew. Slightly
warm, it tasted like coconut water meets butter meets cholera. I drank my whole damn cup.
Super full, I said goodbye to everyone and told Frida I
would bring her back some Cuban Coffee from Key West. She laughed and said “get me into the
University of Michigan.”
