After being in Windhoek for more than 24 hours, our travels now seem to be a world away. The flights from JFK to Johannesburg and then to Windhoek were on time and there were no problems - but it was sooo long. Many of us watched a lot of movies and some of us get very little sleep. It was mentally hard to get on the plane to Windhoek, after finally getting off the long flight. But the last leg wasn't too long and everyone's luggage came through okay. We also saw baboons on the drive from the Windhoek airport to town!
Saturday was mainly a day of recovering from the flight. We got settled into CGE House, met the staff, and spent time in the pool. Today (Sunday) was a day of cultural experiences and our first real exposure to the continuing impacts of apartheid. We split into two groups in the morning with half of us walking to a nearby Lutheran church and the other half driving to a Catholic church for mass. The group at the Lutheran church experienced beautiful singing by a choir from Luther College in Decorah, Iowa! The choir is in Namibia for a couple of weeks, singing at several churches. (They will also go to Etosha game park and Cape Town, so who knows, we may see them again!). Those that went to the Catholic church were blown away by the choir there and how welcoming the people were. It was a good way to start to get the flavor of Namibian culture.
In the afternoon we went on a tour (via the CGE vans) through Windhoek, seeing the results of apartheid era segregation and learning more about the history in Windhoek. Namibia came under the control of South Africa after Germany lost World War I (it was a German colony). When the National Party gained control in South Africa in 1948 and instituted apartheid restrictions, they were applied to Namibia as well. We viewed the city from a hill top, seeing the areas where the whites/higher income people live, the city center, and on to the settlements where the coloreds and blacks were forced to live. We saw the monument for the people killed in 1959 protesting the forced removal from their homes into the new settlement of Katutura. (The South Africans got a page from the U.S. play book and created "reservations" - both rural and urban). Katutura is still largely black and, within the area, still subdivided by tribal heritage. (The apartheid strategy was to divide and conquer - separate the tribes and keep them from revolting as a unit).
Katutura is filled with small government-built cinder block houses, packed tightly together. Some have been expanded, while others remain small. Additional shanties or shacks have been built in places. It's on the edge of town, where the "informal settlements" have developed, that one sees thousands of shanties built from wood and currugated metal sheets. Rural migration into this urban area has created an explosion of shanties, with no running water or electricity. Most of us have never seen poverty like this - it's so much more hidden in Minnesota.
We ended the day with a talk from one of the CGE instructors, Romanus Shivoro, on the development of racism in Namibia. The students were tired, but attentive and we had a good question and answer session afterward.
It's a lot to process!
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