Ponhofi Senior Secondary School

1. Purpose
2. Namibia
   • PCVs Transport Pronunciation Time Currency Miscellaneous The North
3. Ohangwena
   • Location Buildings Shopping Clothing Weather Landscape Trees Animals Insects Kwanyama Language Names Crime
4. Ponhofi
   • Teachers Students School Schedule Classrooms Office Laboratory Library Hostels Cafeteria Guards Teacher Hostels House 15 My Room Kitchen Breakfast and Lunch Supper Leisure Radio
5. Future Topics
6. Bottle Stores

Purpose

Much information is available about Namibia in general and I won't try to repeat it all here (e.g. history, politics, economy, industries, languages, cultures, geography, cities, transportation, recreation and tourism). I will concentrate on my own experiences and location. I will focus not on daily events (which are better recorded in a diary) but generalities about my experience.

Namibia

As of 1995, there are about 100 Peace Corps volunteers in Namibia, and the number will increase by 30 in the next year. Our training group included about 40, though about 5 have left.

Although technically illegal, hiking (hitch-hiking) is the fastest, cheapest way to travel between Oshikango on the northern border and Windhoek, the capital. To hike, you stand on the left side of the road (driving is on the left in Namibia and other former British colonies), wait for a motorised vehicle that doesn't look too full or broken down, hold out your arm, and wave your hand downward. If the driver is local to the area, he (or occasionally she but few women drive here) will twirl his finger in a circle. You can ride in a combie (van), bakkie (pickup truck), or car. More people than you would expect can fit in a combie (15 to 20), bakkie (12 to 15) or car (5 to 8). Cars are best, since they are the least dangerous, least crowded, least noisy, and most comfortable. It is generally easier for white people to get a ride than black people, since many white people will not pick up black people. Taxis can be found in Ondangwa, and you can go anywhere locally for N$2.00. (Windhoek taxis are N$2.00 except for radio taxis which charge as much as N$20.00 depending on the distance traveled.) A ride from Ohangwena to Ondangwa is N$7.00, whether by taxi or combie. To go between Windhoek and Ondangwa you can either hike, take a combie, or take a yellow bus; it costs about N$50.00, or N$0.10 per km. The buses are the slowest and most crowded and not cheaper than a hike. A slow train only goes from Windhoek to Tsumeb.

Windhoek is pronounced differently by different people. Sometimes the W is pronounced like a V and the d is pronounced like a t. Sometimes it rhymes with book (vin-took), sometimes with spook (win-duke). The h is never pronounced.

From April to September, Namibian time is six hours ahead of the central United States. From October to March, it is eight hours ahead of the central United States (and seven hours ahead of Indiana, which doesn't change to daylight savings time).

Namibian coins come only in one year (1993) and 5 denominations (5c, 10c, 50c, $1 and $5). They all come with the same crest on one side; on the other side are a palm tree, a quiver tree, a (mopane?) tree, and an eagle. The paper currency comes in $10, $50 and $100 notes and has pictures of the house of parliament, antelopes, and famous historical Namibians. Namibian currency is on the same exchange rate as South Africa and the South African rand is still accepted in Namibia, though the currencies will be separated later in 1995. One U.S. dollar is worth about 3.6 Namibian dollars (N$3.60) or South African Rand (R3.60). There are 1c, 2c, 5c, 10c, 20c, 50c, R1, R2 and R5 coins, most of which come in two different sizes (smaller after 1990) and colours and several different designs since 1965.

Film costs about N$1.00 per picture to develop. A roll of film costs about N$30 for 24 exposures. Food and accommodation is relatively cheap, but electronics and clothes are expensive. Mail takes 10 to 14 days between Windhoek and the U.S. and another week from Windhoek to northern Namibia.Ohangwena

The north central region, formerly called Owamboland, contains only about 1/20 of Namibia's area, but over half of its population. Yet since the Owambo people are rural, the largest town, Oshakati, is only a small, arbitrarily spread out collection of buildings.

Ohangwena

Ohangwena is a small town in the Ondangwa region in the north, near Oshikango and the Namibian border with Angola. It was a military base during the Apartheid era. Oshikango is the border town and sees more excitement. Engela is closer and has a fairly modern hospital with a small swimming pool and a basketball hoop. Omafo is a crossroads town to the south. Eenhana is a large village along a dirt road to the east. Ongha is a small village nearby. The closest hotel is the Punyu International Hotel in Ondangwa. There is a restaurant at that hotel, and there are some other restaurants like the Continental in Oshakati.

Ohangwena contains many buildings that you would expect to find in a city, though they don't always look like you would expect and are not always clearly labeled. The post office is in a decent building, but it takes a long time standing in line to get anything done, and nothing is automated. There is a Lutheran Evangelical church which reportedly has marathon several-hour-long masses every Sunday. There are two gas pumps outside a supermarket. The municipal water and electricity building is in poor shape. There are several bottle stores (small bars with cute names like Ehafo (happiness), Paradise and Hot Spot; and often a pool table). At the outdoor market you can shop during daylight hours for cheap but sometimes dubious quality food and clothes. There are two big supermarkets, Gift Supermarket and Punyu Ohangwena Depot, which have a mix of food and non-food items. Several small groceries, often poorly lit, are stocked with a miscellaneous sampling of things. Edumeds is the school supply store, selling pens, paper, notebooks and the like; it also has a few books (mostly in Kwanyama) and some expensive furniture. Modern houses can be found in the school compound and near the main buildings in the town. There are no street signs, though some houses are numbered (at least 1 through 19; I live in house 15). Compounds of traditional houses surround the town and can be found at random places in the bush. They are round and built of sticks and thatched roofs, surrounded by a fence of sticks often held together with wire. The owners make their living by growing maize (corn) and occasionally other crops and raising domestic animals. Except for the main highway connecting Oshikango and Oshakati to Ondangwa (which is at the junction on the way to Windhoek), none of the roads are paved, and most are just unimproved one-lane paths through the sand. A couple mine fields are fenced off and labeled with little inverted triangle signs in English ("mines") and Afrikaans ("myn").

The two large supermarkets are poorly lit and have a nauseating soap or cleaning liquid smell. Stores seem to have a large stock of things that I (and probably even most people here) don't need a lot of, like sweets, beer sprouts, salt, butter, beets, mayonnaise, catsup, plastic containers, pots and pans, vaseline, soap, and suitcases. There is also no shortage of sugar, rice, pasta, flour, potatoes, canned meat and fish, soup packets, hot spices, batteries, matches, candles, oil lanterns; entire shelves are lined with hundreds of packages of the same thing. In Western stores you are used to a large variety even in small stores; here, there are maybe two or three types of rice and pasta, and no more than about five types of most things. Bread is not always available because it is perishable and they can't leave it on the shelves for two years like some of the other things, but it is cheap, tasty (when fresh and still soft) and healthy (especially the wheat bread). They don't have certain Western items that you take for granted, like cheese, breakfast cereal, razors, deodorant, dental floss. There is especially a shortage of fresh fruits and vegetables, though stores and vendors at the outdoor market and some small groceries sell apples, oranges, pears, bananas, tomatoes, onions, cabbage, and potatoes. The health food craze has not yet hit the country, so it's difficult to find low fat yogurt, fruit juice without added sugar, and packaged food without a lot of salt, and impossible to find skim milk or canned fruit without heavy syrup. There is a big problem in the north of goiter from lack of iodized salt. Many small, slightly expensive items are in glass cases to prevent theft, but they are difficult to see and you can't easily find small things you need. The cashiers are slow and not all the prices are marked on the items. Before you leave, someone has to double-check everything on your receipt, and he (or sometimes she) can take even longer than the cashier. You also have to check any bags before entering, which can also take a long time. Your groceries are put in plastic bags (no, there aren't any paper bags), but it's a good idea to bring a bag since occasionally they don't have any or the ones they give you are too fragile.

I haven't bought any clothes except for a blue baseball hat. The clothes in Windhoek stores are too expensive and the clothes in Ohangwena stores have the fashion and quality of the clothes you might find in Goodwill in the US. People here usually wear European clothing, though sometimes a teacher will wear an African shirt. People do not generally dress as casually as in the U.S., but at my school I do not need to wear a tie. Students at Ponhofi are supposed to wear a uniform of a white shirt with green trousers (boys) or skirt (girls), but less than half do.

It rarely rains except during the rainy season (January to April), and even then it can be a week or more between rains. Most days are sunny and cloudless from dawn to dusk. It is reasonably cool at night (20 degrees celsius in summer and 8 in winter) but gets quite hot in the early afternoon (above 35 in summer and 28 in winter). It is easy to get sunburned and the sun can be blinding. There is often a breeze to cool things down, but indoors it gets very hot. When it rains there is often a lot of wind. It threatens to rain more than it actually rains. The thunderclouds come in a variety of shapes and are interesting to watch. The sunsets often light streaky, metallic-looking cirrus clouds. The humidity is fairly low but can get high when it rains. Clothes dried faster at our training site in Windhoek because there was more wind and the air was drier.

The landscape is generally flat, dry and sandy. There are no hills in the area; just very gradual depressions and heights. (On the topological map east of here, the highest point in a 10,000 square km area is only about 20 meters higher than the lowest point.) The sand is beige-coloured (and not red like in Tsumeb) and very fine-grained and dusty.

Tall palm trees make a crackling sound in the wind. Other trees that look like deciduous trees give lots of shade despite their very small leaves. All trees are also trimmed from beneath to a height of about 2 meters by domestic animals. Some trees have hard round green fruits which people shake down or fall at random intervals. Some other trees have large bean-like pods like the catalpa tree in the US. Thorn bushes have long thorns which could be used as needles or tacks. During the rainy season, grasses spring out of the sand and cover it in places, though the goats keep the grass from getting long. Also, the trees become much greener, making the scenery much more alive and cheerful.

Domestic animals include cows, chickens, goats, pigs, dogs, and donkeys; other animals include birds, bats, mice, lizards, chameleons, snakes, frogs, and toads. Roosters often wake you up at a random time between 4am and 6am with their loud hoarse shout followed by a cooing that sounds like the rooster is clearing its throat. Small goats sound like children crying or calling. Cows give a low moaning that sounds vaguely perturbed.

There are many insects and other arthropods (especially during the rainy season) which would give an entomologist plenty to study. Mosquitoes bite and hide in closets. Flies keep buzzing around you and landing on you, yet somehow avoid being hit. Big buzzing wasps sometimes come at you but are easier to chase away. Locusts and crickets make deafening high-pitched buzzing and chirping noises. Large beetles, moths, millipedes, and spiders are harmless but not particularly welcome in the home.

Kwanyama, or Oshikwanyama, is the Bantu language spoken in about half of Owamboland and is the most spoken of the 7 dialects of the Oshiwambo language, which is in turn spoken by more than half of the Namibian population. The word "Kwanyama" is derived from "onyama", which means meat, so Kwanyama can be roughly translated as "the meat-eating people". As in most African languages, greetings in Kwanyama are very important. Kwanyama greetings are accompanied by a lot of "ee"'s and "nawa"'s. ("ee" is pronounced "eh", which sounds to me like a goat, or "mm", which sounds like a cow, and means yes. "nawa" means good or fine.) People often say "oh!", "ehalo" (that's nice), "eewa" (okay), "aawe" (sounds like the French "ah oui?" and means no), "aaye" (no), "mooi" (good, a slang word borrowed from Afrikaans), "nai" (bad), "haiti" (I say). Out of respect you call men your father ("tate") and women your mother ("meme"), even if they are barely older than you, or if they are younger but have a higher status than you. Sometimes two people call each other "tate", if taken literally leadsThe language is phonetically and structurally a lot like Swahili, though not close enough for a Swahili speaker to understand a Kwanyama speaker, and the stress does not always occur on the next-to-last syllable. There are no difficult sounds except maybe the x (like Scottish "loch") and the aspirated nasal ngh which can occur at the beginnings of words. Many nouns start with the letter o. The vowels are prounounced like in Spanish or Swahili (a in "father", e in "bet" or "hey", i in "pita", o in "go", and u in "dupe"). There is no word for "please"; the closest thing to it ("alikana") is borrowed from Afrikaans. "Namlish", the Namibian dialect of English, includes the expression "is it?" which means "really?" and can also be used in place of a large number of requests for confirmation ("are they?", "do I?", "should he?", "could you?", etc.).

Names are either Afrikaans or English (Christian, i.e. of Biblical origin) or Kwanyama, and the spelling varies. Boys' names include Albert, Bernhard, Eino, Festus, Frans, Ileni (come), Immanuel, Isack, Israel, Jackson, Jacob, John/Johannes, Joseph, Julius, Junias, Matthias, Paulus, Peneas, Petrus, Phillipus, Phillemon, Salomon, Siegfried, Simon, Tangeni (thanks), Thobias. Girls' names usually end in "a" and include Albertina, Anna, Bertha, Claudia, Elisabetha, Esther, Helena, Hertha, Hilka, Hillen, Julia, Lucia, Lydia, Maria, Martha, Matride, Naemi, Natalia, Ndamononghenda, Ndinelao, Olivia, Peneyambeko, Rauna, Rebekka, Rosalia, Saara, Selma, Sirka, Soini, Sophia, Teopolina, Tuulikemanya, Tuyenikelao.

Some people are friendly to whites/foreigners and some are not. Crime is not a major problem, though like anywhere you still have to be careful, and petty theft is always a problem where there is poverty.

Ponhofi

There are about 25 teachers at Ponhofi. Most are Namibians. I live with a Ugandan (Adam Kamulegeya, a maths teacher), his Namibian wife (Letu) and their baby boy (Hassan). There are two Nigerians (Mamudu Jumare, who has a chemistry degree and has been here five years, and Emmanuel Edomwande, who has a degree in biology) and two Australians (Oddi O'Boyle, an English teacher, and Liam Garvey, a maths teacher). Two (Andrew Cooper, a maths teacher from England and Julie Murphy, an English and Accounting teacher from Scotland) are with the British Volunteer Service Overseas (VSO). Two (Kathryn Cox, an English teacher, and Peter Manfield, a maths and physical science teacher) are with a small group (FPW?) of about a dozen British volunteers who have finished their A-level (secondary school) and will study at universities in England after 8 months (two school terms) in Namibia. At least three Namibian English teachers studied abroad (Michael Kavungo in Cameroon, Eino Heelu in Sierra Leone, Lydia Munghadi in Cuba). The principal, T. Sacharias Andima, is married, but his family lives in Windhoek. He has four houses, including a house in Oshakati and a traditional house. He is tall and thin and still young and handsome. He is authoritative but charismatic and has a good sense of humour. Staff include matrons (Letu's mother is a matron) and guards for the school gates.

There are about 500 students at Ponhofi. Most only speak Kwanyama and English, and few speak very good English. Most come from the surrounding area and nearly all from Owamboland, though one was born in Kenya and another supposedly speaks fluent French. They are all dark-skinned. Their ages range roughly from 17 to 25. Probably almost half are in their 20's. The students are relatively well-behaved, though they aren't very bright or knowledgeable. Only about 30% will pass their grade 12 exams, and very few will continue to Namibia's only university, UNAM, which is in Windhoek.

The school week is Monday through Friday, 7:00am to 1:00pm. There are 8 40-minute classes per day, with a 25-minute breakfast break at 9:00 and a 15-minute break at 11:25. Students stay in the same classroom all day. Monday through Thursday there are study hours in the classrooms from 3:00pm to 4:30pm and 8:00pm to 9:30pm. Assemblies are held from 7:00am to about 7:15am every Monday between the office and the classroom buildings. Students form lines according to their grade and class, listen to announcements and a prayer, and sing a song. Subjects offered at Ponhofi as categorised by the International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) include languages (Kwanyama as a first language, English as a second), humanities and social sciences (accounting, business studies, development studies, geography, history, natural economy), science (agriculture, biology, physical science), and maths. No creative, technical or vocational subjects are offered at Ponhofi. Most courses are based on the core syllabus; few students are capable of taking the exams for the extended syllabus, and none take the higher IGCSE exams. School events include sports (football (soccer), netball, volleyball, and athletics (track and field)), beauty contests, and teacher workshops. The school year is divided into three terms: January to April, June to August, and September to December. There is a month of vacation in May, two weeks in August-September and about a month in December-January. The only other school holidays are Independence Day (March 21) and Easter. Students are allowed to go home for the weekend on "home weekends", which occur about three times per term.

There are 14 classrooms for classes 11A through 11F and 12A through 12H. They all have old and worn but functional desks, chairs, chalkboards, and dusters (chalk erasers). Some of the windows are broken and the floors are dusty. The doors are metal and creak; some of them can be locked. Huge green plastic rain barrels about 2 meters tall by 2 meters in diameter catch rain water funneled from the rooves of a few classrooms.

The staff building is small and has just three rooms: the secretaries' office, the teacher staff room and the principal's office. The walls are stucco and coloured turquoise-green and off-white. The secretaries' office contains an electric typewriter, desks and chairs, and a file cabinet with class lists. The staff room has about 5 desks, each shared by 6 teachers and piled with books, notebooks, papers and school supplies. The timetable and other school schedules are on bulletin boards in the three rooms. The principal's office contains an Olivetti PCS 86 (80286) computer, Seikosha dot matrix printer, electric typewriter, fan, phone, FAX, closet with papers, desks, file cabinets, and a lockable back storeroom with a photocopier, safe, and lots of old papers.

The science lab was a classroom last year. Shelves in back hold a few bottles of chemicals, some physics kits, some plastic biology models, and old microscopes. The walls have some pictures of human anatomy, and a skeleton is near one wall. Tables hold test tubes, beakers, metal stands, scales, butane gas burners, and miscellaneous science equipment. More equipment, including an overhead projector, is in the closet. There is no sink for washing or getting water; instead, there are two glass basins on the floor in front by the teacher's desk.

The library was also a classroom at one time. There are shelves with about 500 books, arranged according to the Dewey Decimal system but not perfectly. The science section has about 50 books. There are a few sets of encyclopaedias in a cabinet. The library doubles as a storeroom and also contains miscellaneous items, including blank exercise/exam books, a cupboard with textbooks, the Gestetner ditto machine (which Albert operates), a huge map of Africa, a list of African authors, and odd junk.

Most students live in the student hostels and eat in the school cafeteria, both within the school grounds. Bullet marks can be seen on the walls, evidence of the armed conflict in the late 1980's between SWAPO (South West Africa People's Organization, the majority party in Namibia today) and the South African army, in which some students were killed. (The school was built as a shield.) The hostels are very simple and bare but clean.

The cafeteria serves a reasonable variety of food. The teachers are served after all the students have received food to be sure that there is enough, which there usually is. Lunch time is unpredictable because the cooks serve at different times and teachers have to wait until students are finished. Teachers eat in a dark, hot room in the back of the kitchen. A basin of soapy water and a towel is provided to wash hands. (Many teachers eat in the traditional African way, with their hands.) For breakfast one can find hard boiled eggs, sandwiches of peanut butter, jelly or butter, and a sugary chocolate-coloured and flavoured tea or coffee (difficult to determine which, even after tasting). For lunch, most days there is oshifima (also known as corn meal, maize meal, mealie meal, pap, mahangu, etc.), though some days there is rice instead, served with some sort of unknown meat or vegetable gravy. Other courses vary and include meat (dry cylinders of fish, dark chicken, miscellaneous cuts of beef or goat, meatballs, or spicy sausage), vegetables (orange- or yellow- coloured squash mashed or in the green or yellow half-shell, cooked cabbage leaves, cooked carrots in a vegetable sauce, potato salad with mayonnaise, shredded pickled beets which the Brits call beetroot), dessert (coloured jello, yellow tapioca pudding, apples), and drink ("cool drink", which is coloured sugar-water like kool-aid, or water, both drunk from plastic cups dipped in a metal pail).

The school is located about 1 km east of the tarred road, to the east of the post office. The school compound is surrounded by a barbed wire fence. In places the students have cut holes in the fence, and the staff occasionally patches them. (According to the school rules, any student caught going through one of the holes will get a N$10 fine.) There are two gates and two guard houses. The south guard house is a tin shack; the north one has screens instead of windows. The south gate is the main one; it has a sign reading "Ponhofi Osekundoskola".

There are five teacher hostel buildings, addressed with numbers 15 through 19. House 15 was built before the other four; it is larger, is brown and cream instead of red or blue, and has a different style. About half of the teachers live in them; the other half live somewhere in or around town.

From January to August, I lived in a teacher hostel (house 15) which is just inside the gate of the school compound. I shared the house with Adam Kamulegeya from Uganda, Letu, his Namibian wife, and their baby boy Hassan. It has running water and electricity, though there are frequent outages, especially during the rainy season, so we have to store water in large (about 10-gallon) plastic containers. Rooms include the kitchen, entry room, sitting room, 2 bedrooms, a bathroom, and a hallway. The back door of the kitchen leads to a small courtyard which is surrounded by a cement wall and contains a metal sink for doing laundry, a clothesline, a tree with enormous green leaves, and miscellaneous junk. A roof covers a small driveway for a car (a truck owned by one of the guards is often there); it is connected to the courtyard by a metal door with a bolt lock that can be (and often is) easily unlocked from the outside. The walls are cement and painted orange-brown and cream. The ceiling is sloped and very high (maybe 5 meters) in the centre. Floor tiles are missing, there are lots of bugs and bats, the floor and walls are permanently dirty, the toilet and sinks leak onto the floor, there is a large hole on the outside of the bathtub, and some light bulbs are dead.

My room contains a large built-in closet with shelves, cupboards and a clothes bar, an olive green metal bed frame with a 3-inch styrofoam mattress and an olive green mosquito net, a medium-sized school desk, a metal chair, a fan, and my things. The glass light cover is broken, and many dead bugs are trapped in it. The windows are covered with thick metal bars. One of the windows has a bullet hole through it. Outside the windows were a tree, a pile of broken desks, chairs, and light fixtures, chickens, sand, small plants, and the school fence. Beyond the fence one can see the track, the football pitch (soccer field), the netball court, a large tree, passing people, cars, cows, goats, and dogs, and in the distance, palm and "normal" trees and traditional housing compounds of thatched huts surrounded by wooden fences. Except during the cooler months, I used the fan most of the time I was in my room to keep cool and keep the mosquitoes at bay.

The kitchen is small but adequate. The stove has no oven and sits on a school desk table. It runs on gas from a large gas bottle and has two burners which are lit with wooden matches. The refridgerator runs on either electricity or gas for when there is an outage. There are two sets of cupboards and a sink. One of the kitchen windows is broken and covered with cardboard and tape. About once a week a truck comes by to take the garbage from the hostels and school.

For breakfast I eat Kelloggs Corn Flakes or Rice Krispies, or Weet Bix (whole wheat biscuits) with whole milk, oatmeal with cinnamon and raisins, fresh, canned or dried fruit, low-fat yogurt, peanut butter and/or jelly sandwiches, peanuts, and drink refridgerated tap water, depending on what is available. For lunch I usually eat at the cafeteria, though I sometimes supplement it with an apple, an orange, a pear, peanuts, or some other snack.

For supper, I have a choice of rice, potatoes, pasta (spaghetti, macaroni and tagliatelli), split peas, dried beans, and canned vegetables including tomato paste, whole tomatoes, butter beans, baked beans, peas, green beans, mixed vegetables, or sometimes asparagus. I always add fresh onions and sometimes cabbage or garlic. I also have a large collection of dry bottled spices; I mostly use pizza/pasta spices, thyme, curry, ginger, parsley, mixed herbs, chili powder and garlic powder. I also use packages of soup or spice mixes (minestrone, mushroom, tomato, curry, soy mince, onion, vegetable, etc.) which contain a lot of monosodium glutamate and salt.

My leisure activities include running, writing, reading, listening to the radio, and occasionally watching tv or having conversations with other teachers. Around sunrise or sunset, I run about 15 or 20 laps on the track around the football pitch, which is obstructed by mud, puddles and weeds during the rainy season but flat, hard and dusty during the dry season.

The two FM radio stations we get are both from the Namibian Broadcasting Corporation (NBC). One is in English; the other is in Kwanyama except for news. News can be heard on the hour at different times of day. At 6am is an hour of world and national news (including sports, weather and finance) called "The World at 6". At 9pm you can call in and give your opinion about any topic (usually Namibian issues like politics and school). At other times you can hear rock and country music and talk shows. On Sundays you can hear a Kwanyama mass. No AM radio stations come in well. On short wave are programs in English, French, German, Portuguese, Swahili, Arabic, and occasionally other languages. Stations I hear include Voice of America (English and French), BBC (English and French), Monitor Radio (English), Deutsche Welle (French, English and German), Radio France International (French), Radio Canada (French), though I mostly listen to the first three in English since I receive them best. I listen to news and talk shows, but I can't get much music. Only one television station, Namibian NBC, is available, and a 5 or 10 meter antenna is needed to receive it. (Two of the five teacher hostels have one.) It only broadcasts during certain hours of the day, and most of the programs are bad, old shows from the US and UK. News is from 8pm to 9pm, and a movie often follows.

Future topics

• the journey from downtown Windhoek to my house in Ohangwena
• housing - compare with PC housing requirements sheet
• neighbours, friends
• how a typical work day differs from my work in the US
• Namibian history: timeline, parallels/relations with US
• differences between Owamboland and the rest of Namibia
• differences between my assignment and that of other nearby Namibian volunteers
• what Namibians see, know, and think about America/Americans
• elders
• Namibian/US cultural similarities and differences
• student opportunities, limitations
• hardships/challenges (see list) - financial, material, comfort, cultural, intellectual, emotional, social
• what the ideal Peace Corps assignment would be like for me

Bottle Stores

• 9 to 5
• Alaska
• Any Time Bar No. 2
• Attention Bottle Store
• Bar We Like
• Cape to Cairo
• Central City Mini Market
• Chips Hotel
• Club Yellow Star
• Club Fantasy
• Coke Shop
• Continental
• Cool Inn Bar
• Corner Life
• Cuima Refresco Restaurant
• CV Joint Centre
• Eden Bar and Mini Market
• Ediva
• Ehafo Shopping Centre, Garage, Embale No. 2
• Etambi
• Face to Face
• Far Well Mr. Happy
• First Life Bar
• Flamenco Bar
• Flamingo Bottle Store
• Friendship Only
• Good Taste Bottle Store
• Hair Salon, Barber Shop
• Happy Bar Ondangwa
• Happy Shakela
• Holiday Inn Store
• Hot Line
• Hot Spot
• Huhu City Bar, Fantasia
• Ileni Bottle Store
• Ileni Auctions
• Independence Bottle Store
• International Shopping Centre
• Kali and Sons
• Kaokoland Bottle Store
• Kings Bar No. 1
• Lets Push Bar
• Lets Swert for Taylor
• Liquor
• Mississippi
• Montes Bottle Store
• Moon Light
• More Than One No. 2
• Nailonga Try Again Bar, Bottle Namib Resting
• Namibia Funeral Undertakers
• Namibian White Chain
• Namundjebo Trading Centre
• Nangy No. 2
• Nantume Young Ones
• Nation Wide Shopping Centre
• Neto Life Center
• New Nation
• New Dynamic City Office
• Oiko
• Omale Shop - We Push and Pull Omusheshe
• Onuno Special
• Open Bar
• Oshakati Comming Shopping
• Oud Black Disco
• P. I. Move
• Paradise
• Pelican Cafe and Supermarket
• Pick and Pay Depot, Fast Food
• Punch Line Computers
• Ruacana Super Market No. 5
• Santorini Inn
• Saraevo Bar
• Seven to Seven
• Small Family Inn
• Sorry Supermarket
• Soweto Store
• Soweto Tonight
• Squash Man
• Sun Valley Bar
• Super Furniture
• Sweet Box Bottle Store
• The System
• The Sign of Mr. Hans
• Three Sisters Bar
• Tonight Pub
• Top Score
• Top Twenty No. 2
• Try Again Bar No. 2
• Two Boys
• United Trading Centre
• USA No Money No Life
• Way of Life Bar
• Welcome Bottle Store
• Welcome Fish and Chips
• Welcome Nanny Bar
• Welcome Morry Bar
• You and Me Bottle Store
• Young Generation
• Young Boys Bar
• Zambezi Night
• Zebra Inn