khorixas! (december travels, week 1)

I spent this past week in Khorixas with Marie and Laurel, visiting Steve and Grace (who are both volunteers in Khorixas). Steve’s job is pretty awesome- he’s a SEED volunteer so he works a lot with the small conservancies around the area working on business development and helping with business plans, etc. That means he “gets” (from our perspective—I’m pretty sure it’s pretty old by now for him) to travel around to the surrounding areas lots for work! Up here in Khorixas (in the northwest of the county), there are a TON of local cultural and geologic sites that tend to be tourist attractions. We went camping for a few days to the west of the town, and while we were there we managed to see a ton of cool things!

the Damara Living Museum featured local Damara showing off their traditional customs. They did a great job selling it, and they were really friendly and willing to talk with us and share their opinions on things! (sorry i know these pictures look terrible but it just took me like 20 minutes to upload 2... )

The Organ Pipes are a unique rock structure that resulted from hot magma from the nearby Burnt Mountain quickly solidifying and then cracking due to heat differences.

Twyfelfontein (“doubtful springs” in Afrikaans) is a very famous site for rock engravings! Most of the art showed local animals (giraffe, rhino, elephant, gnu, ostrich,…) in the context of watering holes or hunting. People made these engravings 2000-6000 years ago (nobody’s sure, apparently?). The story is really cool though – locals used to live in the area and they would tell stories by drawing accompanying pictures on the rock. But even after they had to move out (they were semi-nomadic) in search of other food and water, they continued to make yearly pilgrimages to the mountain/caves at Twyefelfontein because they believed it to be a holy site. Thus, the rock art continued!

Petrified Forest – 280 million years ago, pre-conifer trees grew in northern Zambia! This is apparently back when Pangaea was a thing. The trees got swept down with a river or some water source to this valley, where they were buried by at least 1km of sediment, sandstone, water, etc. Under that pressure, the minerals (silicates, iron/iron oxide, and manganese) slowly replaced all of the cells in the wood until the wood literally became rock. It’s really cool though, you can see most of the trees’ structure (including bark and tree rings and everything!) even though now what is left is hundred-million-year-old rock. The biggest trees found in this area are 30m long and 1.? m in diameter.

it's december!

It's incredibly hard to believe since we're here sweating in the heat. It doesn't seem like the holiday season at all! In fact, since it's technically "summer holiday" from school (which means we all get most of December and part of January off from work!) it's kind of not-at-all like winter break at home. We're enjoying the holiday either way, though!

Sorry for the lack of updates recently! We were without internet for over a month at my school, the wireless box thing got messed up and had to get sent to Windhoek to be fixed.

BUT. Now we're on vacation! I'll have internet sporadically for the next month or so as I travel around Namibia until my school opens again. It's pretty slow right now, and apparently uploading pictures to facebook is faster than putting them on here? (sorry), so here's a link with some recent pictures from this corner of the world:

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10152341478745175.956242.819705174&type=1

My last month or so at school was very hectic, since it was exam time. Our grades 8 and 9 learners had to write exams in every subject, and the exams were prepared by the regional ministry, which led to some interesting scores. By interesting, I mean that less than 25% of my grade 9 learners passed (>40%) their maths exams. It was a little rough. The teachers were all busy trying to keep the learners focused and studying (especially with the added complication of the teachers' strike), marking exams, and reporting scores back to the ministry.

After school got out, I spent last week in Windhoek for some additional Peace Corps training. Now I'm in Khorixas (towards the NW of the country) with a few other volunteers (Marie, Laurel, and Steve) getting to learn a little more about environmental education in this part of the country. Also, doing some camping and really just getting to see a totally different side of the country than we're used to in the south. Next week we're on to Sossusvlei (world famous sand dunes) and the Naukluft (might've spelled that wrong) mountains.

Thanks so much for everyone who's been keeping in touch! Even if I suck at responding (seriously though, internet is hard to get sometimes), I promise I really really appreciate it and getting emails or any kind of mail from you guys really makes my day =)