There Will Be Goat Blood

November 14, 2010
What a week it has been. It started off on last Sunday. I went to church which is always really enjoyable for me. Our church is on our school property and is central to our village. Missionaries built parts of our school and one of our buildings has a stained glass window because that is where the former church was. I feel really blessed that I am living in a Catholic community for various reasons. First of all, the services usually last no more than two hours(with exception) unlike many other churches here which can go on for 6 hours or so. Secondly, I understand what is happening in the mass, even when I do not understand the language (they are speaking in Oshiwambo the entire service). Thirdly, I am able to fully participate and feel one with the community because I have been confirmed. Lastly, it is amazing to go to Africa and feel some type of familiarity which is just how I felt when I traveled in Europe and attended masses in foreign countries and various languages.

So church was nice and then we bought some fat cakes from the local vendors who are women that carry baskets full of goods on their head. On the way home, we go to the local shop and buy a cool drink or two, which is a soda that is nice and cold and now becoming an addiction of mine, a necessity. Then we head home. We eat a meal and then fall asleep in pools of our own sweat. Maybe I should be speaking for myself now.

Sleep is very strange here and it makes everything seem a bit off. I take Malaria medication that has vivid dreams as its major side effect. The dreams feel so real and I would say that I already had vivid dreams anyway, so its intensity can be overwhelming. Two days ago I was convinced it was the night before the MCAT and I had not studied and I was panicking and confused when I awoke. But what is even more unreal is that when I wake up, I am in Africa, lying on a sheet in the sand under a hut, next to a non-English speaking woman openly breast feeding her infant.

By the way it is pouring right now! Raining! Real rain for the first time, puttering on my tin roof like a bag of marbles dropped on a tile floor. For once the air feels cool and refreshing. Here, the good weather is cloudy, so the weather is very nice today. The word for rain and the word for year is the same in Oshiwambo: omvula.

Back to Sunday: I wake up and my host mom, Teolidis, is lying next to me and asks me if I want any indjendje. Indjendje are beads that the Owambo women wear around their waist at all times. Even my infant baby sister has little baby beads around her waist the size of a necklace. They have them from infancy and even into marriage, adding to them as they grow. My mom told me that her grandparents told her that the beads are used to protect against witchcraft. If you have any enemies who are trying to bring you down through witchcraft, maybe they want to ruin your womb so you can not have any children or they want you to get sick, you must wear the indjendje to protect you. Predictably, I answered that I wanted some beads. So I thought we will just go and buy some beads at a market someday; that will be nice. Coincidentally, a woman showed up at our homestead and stayed for 2 hours and she was making indjendge. I thought, 'hmm, maybe those are for me?' but she left and still I had none. Later that day, I saw Meme Teolidis taking off her beads. She said, "Jeannine, come." So I went to her like the obedient child that I am, and she wrapped two strands of her own beads around my waist. I was so honored, but I had nothing to say. No other beads could be so special to me. So I wear them all day every day, when I sleep and when I bathe, just in case someone out there is trying to make me sick or sterile.FOOTNOTE* I had been sick for the previous six weeks on and off with colds, and since I have put on the indjendje I have been healthy. Damn that witchcraft!*

The week continued. I learned how to brew traditional beer that they call omalovu. My aunt Selma, the one with the infant, was there to teach me. She boiled a huge pot over the fire underneath a hut. This is to keep the wind from getting to the fire. The trouble is that inexperieced foreigners like me can't handle the smoke that is produced from a large fire when it is contained in a hut. All I had to do was stir the grain in the boiling water with my big stick but I couldn't deal with all the smoke in my eyes. My lungs were burning, I was pouring sweat, my nose was running and my eyes were watering. I am surprised that I didn't urinate myself, because everything else was producing liquid. Next to me was Selma, standing in the midst of the smoke, unable to detect an ounce of impurity in the air. I felt like she might as well have been breast feeding me, I was such a weak being at that moment. Her infant, Nango, and myself were crying simultaneously. The Owambo women got a huge kick out of the whole ordeal. They were sympathetic but loved the thought of me unable to stand in the smoke. Later, we poured that into a sack and filtered it. Waited for it to cool, and put it in special containers to ferment overnight.
I had a wonderful meeting with all my fellow teachers and principal about what the Peace Corps is, why I am here, the Peace Corps approach to sustainable development, and what my role at the school is supposed to be. I got a lot of great feedback, learned a lot about the school, and was able to come home and enjoy some omalovu that I 'helped' brew!

Saturday morning I woke up late, 7:30 am, and walked outside to see what everyone was up to.
"Wa la la po, meme?"
"Ee-ee."
Mehhhhh. I look down and notice that my mother and my brother are carrying a goat upside down by its legs.
"Are you going to kill that goat?"
"yee-eess"
To my brother: "Wenzel, are you going to kill that goat?"
"mmhmm."
"Oh my God. Kalunga Kandje."
I watched my mother bend at the waist, lay the goat on its side, and hold its four legs, two in each hand. Wenzel left and went looking for then knife. The goat seemed calm. My brother held the side of the goats head, and in the middle of the inside of our homestead, he severed his neck. Blood was pouring all over the sandy ground. I told them I had to go for a run and I sprinted out the door.

I came back to the homestead and learned to pound mahangu, the traditional grain that all the Owambo people eat. Whenever I meet a new woman, she always asks me my name, the name of my father, and if I can pound Mahangu. Every Saturday morning, we pound the Mahangu for the week that is the key ingredient for making the sand porridge I tell you about. I call it sand porridge but it is really just porridge. If they do not pound the mahangu very well then sand can get in there. However, there is always a small percentage of sand in all the food here it seems. My Peace Corps Volunteer friend, Lance, made a joke once that many people say they want to live on the beach but now we can say that we lived off the beach. Maybe you had to be there but I relate to it.

So I pounded mahangu by placing the grain in holes in a special hut using a heavy wooden mallet taller than my body, lifting it up and thrusting it into the ground. I was pretty much asked to please stop and let the woman who had a baby a month ago step in because I couldn't pull my weight. So I regretfully step outside the hut and see a blackened goat head and four blackened goat hooves charring above an open fire. Too soon. About an hour later, I am looking at its intestines and liver and muscles in a bowl in front of me next to some freshly pounded sand porridge for lunch. I avoided the intestines but am pretty sure I ate some liver. My two sisters and I sat separately in a hut and didn't speak the whole meal. I felt almost like something spiritual was happening, like I could feel its life force, or energy or nutrition or whatever you want to call it because it is all basically the same, being directly transferred to me; I felt myself gaining some type of strength. Perhaps it is all in my head but I think I am an Avatar.

The weeks are now flying by even though I have little to do. The more comfortable I am becoming, the easier it is to be at school. I am really looking forward to having my own classroom. I will be teaching one math class, one life science, and one physical science class, and then 14 periods of ICT. I know that some of my friends would find this hilarious, because I am the most computer illiterate out of all of them. Yet, here I am ironically in the movie that is my life, Mr. Becker Goes to Africa to Teach Typing 101. (RCS shout out.) Hey, ya gotta do what they need ya to do and not what they want ya to do. I am teaching the classes I want to teach besides ICT and I will be hopefully holding English workshops for the teachers after shool to improve English all around in the school.

Something interesting happened this week. As the rainy season approaches, the clouds have been overhead and there has been extreme wind at night. There is heat lightening in the distance and it is extremely beautiful. The other night we heard a CRASH. I thought it was thunder but my family got up and went to the other side of the homestead. As I believe I have told you, the homestead is surrounded by cinder block walls made of concrete bricks. A whole wall to our homestead fell over due to wind, taking down one of the walls to our shower, potentially exposing someone to the farm and surrounding homesteads. We arrived to see our farm in the distance instead of our wall, and I expect people to start getting upset. If this were my homestead, I would have felt angry and frustrated and helpless. I would have complained about the poor quality of how it was built or my bad luck. Despite the fact that this natural disaster is going to entail a great deal of labor and monetary investment, my mother and siblings and aunt all start laughing hysterically. They begin making jokes left and right about how maybe there was a thief trying to jump the wall and he might be dead underneath and about how now the goats and cows are going to be able to reign freely all night in the house. Here, they laugh and move forward. Every day they have woken up at 5 am to continue to mold the cinderblocks from powdered cement and sand, working non-stop when the sun is not at its peak. Once they have made all the blocks they will construct the wall, but for now we have spare pieces of tin up to keep the the animals out. After we laughed for 20 minutes about the demolished wall, I tried to get into my room and the door to the building would not open. Of course. We tried and tried but it would not budge. My brother turned to me with a smile and said in English, "Everything is complicated," and we all could not stop laughing. It was one of those classic moments where everything feels like it is falling apart at once. Who knew those moments are cross-cultural?