Here we go again, yet again

Lying in wait

A few months ago I wrote about how lucky we were to be in Namibia during these covid times. Well, the tides have changed, as I expected they eventually would.

Namibia is solidly in its third wave of COVID-19 and things here are worse than ever before. Everyone either knows someone with covid or has it themselves. Hospitals are overwhelmed and full to capacity, there isn’t enough oxygen at medical facilities, and not enough people are vaccinated. It seems like every day a new record number of cases are being confirmed and more and more people are dying. It’s abysmal.

Nate’s mom visited for about three weeks in May, and we travelled through the Caprivi Strip with her. It was an awesome trip, and a perfect last hurrah before the shit hit the fan. She left just in the knick of time before things got truly terrible.

This picture is hilarious. I call it “Landing, reconsidered.”

We pulled M out of school weeks ago, before the President mandated that schools be closed. So he’s once again bored at home, watching too much tv, with “school” consisting of him playing ABC Mouse on his kindle. Luckily I still had some sticker and painting books to keep him busy, and I’m once again glad I stocked up on those when I had a chance.

Mission Windhoek is now also on Authorized Departure. Been there, done that; there’s no way we’re going down that road again. But emotions are running high in the community as friends ponder what’s right for their families or are finding out that their summer travel plans have been shot to hell. It’s just not an easy time for anyone.

We were supposed to go to Swakopmund for Father’s Day weekend, but, watching the case numbers, it was becoming abundantly clear that going to Swakopmund was a bad idea. Several weeks ago, I rescheduled the reservation for late-July and we planned to go camping instead. Then the President of Namibia announced a lockdown for Windhoek and two surrounding towns, and we weren’t sure if we’d be able to leave the city, even if the campsite was in the same region as Windhoek. So we spent the weekend at home, cooking, playing board games, putting together Legos, and enjoying quiet family time. It was a fun, pleasant weekend, for the most part.

On Friday evening Nate had to go to the airport to meet a family that was newly arriving to post, so I had to take M with me on Artie’s evening walk. We were walking along and I noticed a car pulling into a driveway, and when the compound gate opened, two dogs came running out. We stopped and waited until the car and dogs were inside the gate and the gate was closed. Once the coast was clear, we started walking again and after we’d passed the house with the previously-open gate, I discovered the gate wasn’t actually closed all the way when one of their dogs (the littler of the two) came out through the gate. It stood there and stared at us for a few seconds while in my head I rapidly trying to figure out how to keep M safe if this dog attacks Artie since there was no sidewalk or curb just a really steep ditch cliff, how was I going to keep holding M’s hand if I had to keep Artie safe too, maybe I should pick M up?, Artie had surgery recently and what if the dog rips open her incision, then WHOOSH BAM.

A car came flying down the hill and hit the loose dog. It lay there on the ground twitching, and its owners did NOTHING. I screamed “that car just hit your dog” and a man came walking out and he picked the dog up. Poor thing. There’s no way it survived.

We kept walking until we reached an area with a sidewalk where we could safely stop, and while M hugged Artie, I cried.

Then the questions started. “Why did those people not close their gate?” “Why was the dog twitching?” “Why did that dog want to come after Artie?” “How do you die when you get hit by a car?” “Why did that car hit that dog?”

Ugh, it was terrible.

Sometimes life just keeps kicking you while you’re down.

Artie in the wild!

We are glad that we’ve spent the last year exploring Namibia, camping, road-tripping, making new friends, and living life here to its fullest. It certainly makes times like these a little easier, knowing that if for some reason we had to leave tomorrow and never come back, I’d have zero regrets. Also, honestly it is kind of nice to just stay at home and relax after all the traveling and camping we’ve been doing.

No one knows what the future holds, but looking at the experiences of other countries, cases will probably continue to increase for the next week or so before they gradually (very very gradually, I’m expecting) start to come down. We might have to reschedule our 4th of July plans also, but you know what, worse things could happen. In the meantime, we’ll play board games, cook through the food in the freezer, watch all the Star Wars movies, and be grateful for what we have.

Namibia: there’s no place quite like it

Things that are bringing me joy right now

After some of my recent blog posts, you might think that things here are all doom and gloom. But they aren’t! There are some bright spots.

I love nothing more than a good list. So here’s what’s making me happy these days, in no particular order:

• Cooking dinner. Really. Working from home gifts me an extra hour at least to make dinner. That means I can have a glass of wine, listen to a LP and leisurely spend some quality time in the kitchen by myself. And these days, my weekday dinner game is on fire.
  

  My favorite corner of our house

• Listening to audio books. Specifically Calypso, written/read by David Sedaris. Wow is this book hilarious. The essays “The Perfect Fit” and “I’m Still Standing” particularly were my favorites. It’s poignant, funny and just awesome, exactly what you’d expect from David Sedaris. Other good ones include Children of Blood and Bone, The Song of Achilles, Bad Blood, and Lafayette in the Somewhat United States.
• When Artie poops right by a house where a dog is barking at her. I don’t pick it up. One good turn deserves another. There’s this one house where there are three dogs that just go ape-shit every time we walk by. I wish she’d drop a big one there but she hasn’t yet.
• Emptying out the vacuum cleaner canister. There are few things that make me feel more accomplished than getting visual confirmation of all the cleaning I’ve just done. It’s an obsession.
• My “wine cellar.” I could call it our wine cellar, but I’m the one who, a) picked out all the wine, b) cares about it, and c) drinks most of it (Nate prefers beer). With our last lockdown, the sale of alcohol was prohibited. I wasn’t about to go through another lockdown rationing wine, hesitant to give it to friends in need lest I run out. So we currently have more than 150 bottles of wine in the garage. It’s glorious.
  

  Divided into boxes of red, white, rose, white bubbly and rose bubbly. I ran out of wine boxes so I used an empty camping gear box.

• Dinnertime. We light candles, set the table and spend at least 30 minutes together, chitchatting. We listen to an LP, M tells us about the monsters he’s trained (he genuinely believes he is a monster trainer, and we’ve learned the hard way not to joke about it) and we tell stories or have a dinnertime poetry slam. M is surprisingly good at putting together fairly long rhyming poems on the fly. We talk about the gods (yes, plural) and more monsters, and we negotiate how many more bites he has to take before he gets dessert. It might not sound like much, but I do enjoy it.
  

  When we can’t go to restaurants, we create one at home

• Care packages. A friend from Muscat recently sent us a box full of Trader Joes goodies and I almost cried. And the other day I was talking to my mom and I mentioned how much M has been drawing lately, and then two weeks later we got a care package full of sketchbooks and new markers.
• Scouting out all the strange/ostentatious houses in our neighborhood. We live in a fancy part of Windhoek. This was actually one of the strangest things about our first Foreign Service tour: our house was in the rich neighborhood. This was not something I was used to. We can’t afford that shit. But most embassy housing is in the nicest neighborhoods because they are generally the safest. So I enjoy wandering the neighborhood, looking at the ridiculous houses and wondering how people have enough money to build houses like that. Or why exactly they’d want a house like that.
  

  Where did they get the money to build this?!

  

  What the heck?

• Not wearing socks. Winter in Namibia is COLD. Surprisingly so. And despite being technically from Wisconsin, I am a child of the tropics. I grew up wearing flip-flops and my feet don’t like socks. They make my toenails, no matter how short they are, uncomfortable and they smell awful.  Hurray for summer (spring doesn’t exist here) and a happy sock-free existence.
• Playing Gloomhaven. The box is enormous and super-heavy and the game costs nearly $100. But we bought it with Amazon gift cards, anticipating a day when we wouldn’t be able to leave the house much and it’d would be just the two of us. Let me tell you, Gloomhaven is SO WORTH IT. It’s like a choose-your-own adventure game with each round being completely different from the last. We each play two characters and at this point I am emotionally attached to mine (I named them Samantha the Scoundrel and Isaspella the Orchid Spellweaver). We set the game up on Saturday afternoons and play as many rounds as we can before putting it all way on Sunday night. It takes up the entire dinner table.
• Planning future trips. We still have two R&Rs to take in the next 22 months, plus a lot of travel in Namibia that we want to do. Figuring out itineraries, the best places to stay, etc is my happy place.

Wow, that’s more than I expected, honestly.

The State of Emergency in Namibia has been lifted and things here are heading back towards “normal,” not because it’s epidemiologically warranted but because there’s no more public or political will for restrictions. Things were starting to improve but then they loosened all the restrictions at once and this past week kids went back to school. I hope there won’t be an increase in cases and that things were under control enough beforehand for it to not be a complete disaster, but we’ll see. In the meantime we wear our masks, take calculated risks and try to make the most of it. We are glad we can finally leave Windhoek again!

Here we go again

The sign outside M’s school

Before we get started, I have no idea what’s happening with the formatting here… but I don’t care enough to fix it right now. Just imagine that there are in fact paragraph breaks.

At first it seemed like Namibia had done such a great job of nipping the COVID pandemic in the bud. There was an early lockdown, the borders were basically closed, and a number of other mitigation measures were put in place.

But in the second half of May, after a 45-day window of no new cases, cases started being reported again. At first it was just in returning quarantined Namibians and permanent residents. Then some truck drivers coming from neighboring countries tested positive.

Then some people escaped quarantine and oops they tested positive and spread the disease.

Then parts of the Erongo Region– the towns of Walvis Bay and Swakopmund– were locked down.

Oh, but guess what? There are five roads leading out of Walvis and Swakop (three paved roads, two dirt roads) and there were only police checkpoints on the three paved roads. The people in that area were free to come and, most importantly, LEAVE, using the unpaved dirt roads.

And so here we are. Every region in Namibia is reporting cases of COVID-19 and there is rampant community spread in many cities, including Windhoek.

The situation in Windhoek has been deteriorating for weeks now. On Wednesday afternoon a new lock-down was finally announced. This time there’s even an 8 pm curfew.

To be honest, it’s hitting me harder than I thought it would. Part of it is frustration with the fact that the lockdown didn’t happen sooner, which could have literally saved lives; part of it is that this is lock-down Round 2. We already did this once. If everyone had done their part and followed the rules, we wouldn’t be here again.

We are busier at work now than ever, and our nanny/housekeeper is no longer coming to our house. M had a short 4 weeks of in-person school back in July, which stopped on August 4 when it was clear the situation in Windhoek was going to hell. So he’s stuck at home with parents who hardly have time for him during the day, bored and watching too much tv. Luckily I did some shopping while the restrictions were loosened and we have a stockpile of a wide variety of books for him. And his new Kindle just arrived in the mail. Parents of the year, right here.

Every time I cough or M spikes a fever, I wonder if we have it. Where we could have gotten it. Who we could have given it to. Who they could spread it to. What the outcomes might be.

We are glad we travelled and explored while we could. Maybe now that we’re not going anywhere I’ll finally have some time to write about some of it.

Camping hand washing station

For now, I am frustrated, saddened and disheartened. But I’m ok really.

We will take care of projects around the house. I’ll have more time for painting and writing, being creative. We will play lots of Gloomhaven. We’ll try out some new recipes. And some new wines.

I’ll get through this. We will all get through this.

How are you doing?

A Red Southern Bishop at Avis Dam. The wildlife in Namibia is interesting even though we can’t go anywhere, so here are some photos of some of the most commonly-seen animals around Windhoek!

No, really. How are you doing?

I hope you’re at least doing alright. The world is a crazy place right now, and this is a hard time.

We are okay / doing the best we can / muddling through / taking it day by day.

Some days are better than others. I’d say I’m better now than I was in the earlier days of our lockdown, mostly because I’ve figured out how to manage myself more effectively.*

I feel like I’m getting the hang of the whole working remotely thing. It’s all about accepting the imperfect/less-than-ideal and just going with the flow. We set up M’s art station next to my standing desk and sometimes he’ll sit down there and say he has work to do. Also I am totally at peace with his screen time amount. We both still have a lot of work to do and if watching Disney+ or playing a game on his kindle keeps him occupied while we’re both on calls, that’s just fine.

Lovebirds in the neighborhood

We spend most of the our weekends outside in our yard, watching movies, cooking more-time-consuming-than-normal food, or playing Gloomhaven.

I’ve enjoyed having time to dust off some cookbooks and try new dishes, or to finally cook the things in my NYT Cooking recipe box. Here are some of our favorite new recipes:

• These cookies are astonishingly good. I understand why they are called “The Cookies.”
• If you’re someplace with access to pork and sauerkraut, you have to make choucroute garnie.
• This is a refreshing take on tuna salad .
• These are the best roasted carrots I have ever eaten.

Gloomhaven is an awesome board game that we got last year when we had several Amazon gift cards lying around. We first tried to play it shortly after arriving in Windhoek when we were jet lagged and tired. It was such an extraordinarily confusing experience, we put it back in the cupboard and didn’t even think about playing it again until now. We figured that we’d have the time to finally sort through everything and we were right! It’s really fun, interesting, and it’s nice to currently have four days (we are at the end of a four-day holiday weekend) to work our way through it. There are like 95 different scenarios, and each scenario is its own game. They all build off each other, but you can just play one scenario and then put everything away; you don’t have to play the entire thing all at once.

Artie the Explorer!

I have never in my life been so grateful to have a dog. Artie has been a lifeline for all of us lately. Her persistent optimism, playfulness and happy demeanor give us all something to look forward to and she helps keep us busy. And she is M’s only non-adult companion right now. It’s hilarious watching them run around chasing each other. She is a saint.

So, yeah. That’s how we’re doing. Not great, not bad, basically fair-to-middling.

*This is basically through focusing on things that I can control and having “good” habits like reading books, walking Artie, making the bed, doing yoga, etc. Then I track it all. It helps me feel more intentional and productive.

Dassies, or rock hyraxes. The elephants’ closest relative!

At home, finally

Sunset from the back yard

We’ve been here in Windhoek for nearly four months, and it’s feels like home. We’re developing weekend routines, weekdays are starting to feel less insane, and I don’t need to use Google Maps to go everywhere.

Pandemonium in the living room on HHE delivery and unpacking day

Our sea freight shipment, or HHE, arrived just about a month ago, and it’s already 90% put away. Our house here has lots of built-in storage space and a huge kitchen, plus a garage (a garage!!!! We’ve never had a garage before!), so it was surprisingly easy to find places to put things. Although some stuff got shoved into closets, all of which I promised myself I’d deal with later.  Our photos and art are on the walls, our carpets are on the ground, we’re eating off our own plates with our own silverware, M has his books, I have all my kitchen gear and cookbooks, and Nate has his record players. Everyone is happy.

Life here has been relatively easy for us to adjust to. Most of the social culture is outdoors and it’s awesome. Plus you can easily buy just about everything you need, including pork products and alcohol. And things here are so darn inexpensive. It’s glorious. It’s just so nice to be someplace where it’s comfortable to be outside. I can’t stress that enough. Granted, we haven’t been here during the worst of the summer heat, but there’s no way it will ever be as bad as Oman. Nate and I were outside this morning at 11 am, hauling around bags of dirt and shoveling the soil, attempting to get a garden going. We never could have done that during an Omani summer without suffering from heat exhaustion.

One of many overwhelming aisles at Embassy Liquor. Yes the store is called Embassy Liquor. It’s almost like they knew who their best customers would be…

Speaking of Oman, we took some of the lessons we learned there and applied them to our life here. One of those lessons was to get our adventure car as soon as possible. We purchased a bakkie, or pick-up truck, and it is a big powerful vehicle. It’s the perfect 4×4 to explore Namibia with, and we’ve added a big metal top, or canopy, as they call it here, to the back. There’s so much storage space it’s amazing! We still need to get a roof rack and a steel rear bumper, but we are ready to go!

The workweek here took some serious getting used to. Monday through Thursday we work from 7:30ish to 5:15ish with a one-hour lunch break, and then on Fridays we work from 7:30ish to 12:30ish. We’re always running around like chickens with our heads chopped off trying to get to work on time (which never happens), and then in the evenings we scramble to get dinner on the table before M goes to take his bath around 7:45.  It makes me appreciate the Muscat workweek and commute, which had us leaving the house around 7:30 am and getting home by 4:45 pm each day. Thank heavens for our housekeeper; without her we’d be spending all our time doing laundry, tidying up or cleaning the kitchen.

Cloudy sky

One of my favorite things to do on Saturday mornings is to go to the farmer’s market. There are all kinds of vendors, and when you want to buy something, the vendor sets your stuff aside and gives you a receipt. Once you’re done visiting all the stalls, you take all your receipts to the payment area, pay your bill (you can even pay with a card!), and they mark all your receipts as “paid.” Then you go hand your paid receipts to the vendors and you collect your stuff. It’s ingenious. It’s nice to be able to stroll around without lugging heavy bags everywhere. Although it’s also kind of bad because you don’t realize exactly how much you purchased until you have to collect it all and you leave with far more than you actually needed.

Another cloudy sky, this time in the morning

We’re glad we’ll be here for three years. We are settling in, and M is happy at his “tall house in Africa.” Our time in the U.S. over the summer (about 7 weeks) was really hard for him and he kept asking to “go home.” We tried to explain to him that Muscat wasn’t our home anymore, that we were going to have a bunch of different homes over the summer, and that we’d finally arrive at our new home in Namibia, but what 3-year old really understands that? When we finally pulled up the driveway to our house in Windhoek, he said “Are we at my house in Africa?” We were very relieved to finally tell him we were home.

It’s like we can all finally exhale after a summer of holding our breath, now that we’re here. And that’s a nice feeling.

I love it when a plan comes together

Our next post is Windhoek, Namibia! We will arrive in September 2019, insha’Allah, and we could not be more excited.

I wrote earlier about third tour bidding, and it was a stressful unpleasant time for all of us. I didn’t really realize how stressful it’d been until it was over and I felt like I could finally relax.

We had initially identified Windhoek as one of our top choices, and pretty quickly it became our top choice. Nate was placed on the short list, which was sent to the bureau in DC, and a few weeks later he was notified that he was the bureau-leading candidate. Then, about a week later, he was offered a handshake for the job. Now he is waiting to be paneled, which means that all the job offers are being reviewed to make sure they aren’t breaking any rules. After being paneled, cables will be sent to out with travel orders and so forth. I’m not sure how long the whole paneling thing takes, but hopefully it won’t be too long. In the meantime we are planning to explore Oman some more and make the most of the rest of our time here.

Namibia a huge country (twice the size of California) in southern Africa with a population of only two million people, which makes it one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world. It’s home to the Namib desert and some of the world’s tallest sand dunes, and it’s also the first country in Africa with environmental conservation and protection written into its constitution. There are lots of national parks and game reserves throughout the country, plus wineries and craft breweries. And did I mention that you can easily buy pork products throughout Namibia?! We absolutely cannot wait to get out and explore everything that Namibia has to offer.

It’s a huge weight off our shoulders to know where we’re headed next, and now we can buckle down and start checking off the last of our Oman must-do’s.  Experience tells us that things can change on a dime, so we are going to make the time count while we can. And then, hold on Namibia, here we come!