Monday, August 11, 2008
ok, one more thing....the cutest thing happened today...i was on my way home COMPLETELY exhausted and i ran into the girls who get water from my tap for their house....they dont speak any english so we greeted and had some little small talk. i said 'ah, na raroka!" i'm tired! and they immediatly took the three water bottles out of my hand and my backpack off my shoulders and carried my stuff the rest of the way home!! it was hilarious:) aaaaaaaaaand adorable:)
so, we're working hard but having fun too:) friday night after the never-ending (wonderful) day scott, lindsey and i celebrated a friends birthday!! it was awesome...the best part was hanging before in the salon while they ladies got ready...the salon is attached to the bar. as you can see we had some fun with the wigs:) hehehe
the pictures directly below and above are from the training!! we started today and it's already been awesome:) the mechanic team each picked a bike to fix-up to ride to lunch!! My favorite is moses with his pink beauty...he LOVES THAT THING!! hahaha :) the meme in front of the building is lillian...she was a cleaner at the bed and breakfast when i visited back in november and when i returned she had quit there and started her own buisness- cooking and selling food under the tree!!! since january she has expanded from one table to three and benches:) I asked her to cater our 6 week workshop and she got permission to house us in the little building next to her tree!!! Thanks to the Buffie/Henson/Shaw/Smith families we're able to eat each day and support a local buisness womyn!!
Nothing like a near disaster to bring a group closer!
FRIDAY WAS AMAZING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! My attempt now to relay the magic that happened last Friday will not do the experience justice! But I’ll try my best:)
First of all I have to share that now now my little neighbors are on my front stoop playing Uno. They’ve been over almost everyday for the past week or so playing, having dance parties, coloring, reading and the like. Now they don’t even knock anymore which is great, hilarious, and a bit obnoxious all at the same time:) They make me laugh and can entertain themselves just by looking at all the weird ‘merican stuff in my house so it’s all good. Yesterday a few of them even started cleaning my house when I was doing the dishes!! I gave them the book Little Mermaid last week and Saturday morning we watched the movie and ate popcorn. I told the girls that in my home we always eat popcorn when watching movies and Ndapandula said “yeah, I’ve seen it in the movies!” PRICELESS! Oh, and the gifty’s are pouring in….Tuesday Ndeshi brought me sweets and the Monday before Marta and Maria brought a small bag of Mahangu- the traditional grain used to make porridge. Fuuuuuuuuuuunnny :)
Oooooooooooook now for FRIDAY!! First the story, then a reflection…
Ideal Scene: a 4 hour procedure to offload a 12meter container full of bikes off of a truck bed with a front end loader and 6 poles.
Our Scene: an 11 hour day, 9 hour procedure, and 4 poles. Ready, GO!
The Uukumwe Nkurenkuru Bike Shop has been an idea since January. We’ve discussed as a group, identified it as a need for our community, written a proposal, chosen a management team, met with the project coordinators from the capital, received news from our partners at Bicycles for Humanity (THANK YOU JOSH PACE!) that the container full of bikes was being shipped to arrive in country on June 21, waited as the container went through a revamping adding a door and windows so it could function as a shop and then finally….the call: the container was on it’s way!!! At 4:00pm Thursday the truck left Windhoek and began the 12hour journey north to Nkurenkuru. At 7am Friday morning I got the call that the driver was in Rundu, now just two hours away, the final stretch on the dirt road. I called our team and met them at the town council to receive our plot of land for the shop.
Filled with excitement, this is where the chaos started:
We’d been asking for land since April, checking in almost every day, and just Friday we were granted a grassy plot with thorn bushes strewn throughout. So, we got the tools from the garden and started clearing the land so we would have space for the truck to offload the container. In the midst of hacking through the thorns we heard a rumbling in the distance….looking up towards the road we saw a huge orange truck tearing down the path and so we ran to the road to flag it our way. This is when the delivery of the container became the towns entertainment for the day- everyone wondering what it was doing all the way out here, gathered around to see what would become of it. Now we had to get the front loader from the town council and poles to help offload- NORED, the electric company said we could borrow telephone poles from them but had left early in the morning without handing them over so now we were on the hunt. The longer the truck was here the more we had to pay and we didn’t have the budget for that so we really had to buckle down and find these poles. We split up and after an hour and trips to homesteads, NORED, the hospital, hardware store, grocery and even looking in the bush we managed to find four poles. All different sizes, three of them wooden, one a steel pipe. Now that we had the poles we needed a truck to transport them to the container- I saw one in front of the hardware store and asked for his help but after refusing we spotted a tractor from the hospital- the guys and I loaded them up and finally made it back to the container thinking now it was all downhill from here!
At 10:00am we started the offloading process: no one here had ever done this procedure before; not the truck driver, off loader, myself or anyone else present so I was on the phone with Michael in Windhoek getting the play-by-play, I showed the off loader a video of what it’s supposed to look like and everyone standing around had their opinions too. Eventually we hooked up the chains and started to lift the container to get the poles underneath in order to role it off the truck. The first attempt left the off loader airborne! Third and fourth attempts almost knocked the container sideways off the truck- three hours later with only one of four poles underneath, the off loader driver decided it was time for his lunch break unless we were going to pay overtime….!!!!!!!!! He locked up the machine and left, saying he would be back at 2:00. I was a bit crushed knowing now we would definitely go over the time budgeted to have the truck here and with no real end in sight. Michael had suggested a last resort could be to break the lock of the container and start unloading bikes to lighten the load- I suggested this to the group and with a single nod and a glimmer of hope in their eyes we got a rock and pounded off the lock.
Opening up that container was like Christmas morning!!! To see the look on the faces of these folks who have waited, planned, dreamed about this project coming to fruition….to hear their gasps as they soaked up the view of hundreds of bikes they would be unloading, spending the next 6 weeks repairing getting ready for selling and riding… to watch little kids walk by on their way home from school with utter amazement and confusion….it was incredible! Moses and I jumped up in the container and started unpacking one by one- with each bike he would say “ah, this one, this one is mine!” but then the next one would be even nicer and now that would be his….Markus joined and the three of us passed out all of the stuff that the folks in Canada loaded up for us not just bikes but spare parts, water bottles, national geographic magazines, shirts, bike stands, a table and shelves for the shop, tools, tires, lunch bags, even a lone softball! And my personal favorite….a huge piece of cardboard spray painted with a peace sign and the message “To Namibia with love from Canada!”
It was the most amazing two hours of my life thus far- we unloaded, laughed, dreamt about the possibilities we had with this shop, smiled at every single thing we passed from inside to the folks helping on the ground, took pictures and just ENJOYED EVERY SECOND!! After we unloaded a third of the truck we decided it’s best not to take them all out because we would never get the bikes back in! Around 3:30 the driver returned and this time we meant business: the front loader lifted the container higher and we got all four poles underneath then it attached itself to one end, the truck driver was in the other and at the count of three the truck started to drive forwards allowing the container to roll off. All of a sudden the container came crashing down on top of one of the poles smashing it to pieces and BLAMO the Uukumwe Bike Shop was in it’s new home!!!! Cheering and screaming and more pictures commenced and the smiles were endless. Now we just needed to reload the goods, buy a new lock and end the day. Of course that took another three hours and we couldn’t fit all the stuff so we loaded a hospital truck with everything leftover and now my sitting room is full of bicycle goodness:) Now it was dark, everyone was sore and exhausted from the long day of working together. Markus and Moses showered at my place and we discussed the possibility of them camping out to protect the shop since the lock could just be broken easily. Eventually it was decided that we’d just hope for goodness to surround it throughout the night!
The next two mornings Beatilda called me before 7am letting me know everything was safe…..she had been watching during the night and was back at post by sun-up:) WHAT A RIDE!!!!!! :)
Now for a reflection…. The day was INSANE, nothing went as planned, everything took longer cause we were walking to and from places to find poles, trucks, locks, bread and water cause no time for a lunch break for the rest of us, we couldn’t call anyone to communicate after 11:00am so if we had a message for someone we had to go find them and Michael could no longer assist from afar. Some folks in the community whose help we desperately needed were not finding it in them to assist while those of us involved in the project and random kids from the village helped all day. So many times we needed a break from folks, just to borrow poles or transport, it really was simple for them to help and after-all THIS WAS FOR THE COMMUNITY!!! Why were people being so stubborn?? At the beginning of the day when we got the plot of land that needed clearing, I wanted to express my frustration to Tate Shyinga. Weeks ago he had politely told me to stop bugging him when I asked everyday about our plot. I was doing that because I didn’t want to be stuck when the truck arrived with no place to put it and here we were, the very day of the arrival, having to cut down small trees! I realized that because of our language and cultural barrier anything I would have to say to him would just not translate- we would go around in circles, and expressing my frustration (and even a bit of anger at this point) would only negatively affect me. He wouldn’t wear my emotions, we wouldn’t have a dialogue about professional courtesy or how messed up it is that he couldn’t corporate with us. Hell, he was the guy who knew how to offload and instead sent someone who didn’t know what he was doing, didn’t know me, didn’t know the project- the guy who left for the three hour lunch break…just unnecessary complications and for what? This shop was for the community, not some business venture that he wasn’t going to benefit from…..why couldn’t people just join together and throw us a bone!
Two things:
1) the bone that was thrown to us was all the stumbling blocks in our way. Every time we got shut down it brought us closer. It caused is to think differently, find new resources, rely on one another (as the uukumwe committee) in a new way and just get it done. I can’t imagine it going another way actually….now folks had the sense of accomplishment that motivates one to work harder. We had worked for this shop not just accepted a free gift. Now it was theirs. It was ours.
2) The most fascinating thing I realized from this experience was the unnecessary space emotions like frustration and anger take up. As mentioned, I could have argued with folks when they didn’t help, I could have engaged people in a frustrating dialogue of finger pointing and reprimanding but it wouldn’t have done any good. It would have left me yelling at a brick wall because there was no room for arguing, only room to figure out how to finish what we started. I just kept thinking if something like this would have happened with a bunch of Americans there would have been so much unnecessary dialogue about who messed up where and when- we would have had the same result, a container off loaded to start a bike shop, but it would have been tainted by negativity and blaming. Point being- we…I, always have a choice about how to react to any given action. My dad has talked about that for years and I understood it before but Friday it became real to me in a new way. What struck me was not only the choice but the process of making the choice. Choices like deleting a text message meant to ‘put someone in their place’, counting to ten and coming back to center in order to find solutions instead of naming problems. I felt myself naming the emotions of anger and frustration and smiling at them while I made room for patience, compassion, and understanding. I realized that if I had the ability to communicate my frustration I would have….but by having that outlet being taken away from me I was able to take a few steps back and really realize just how counter productive it would have been. By letting go of my frustration I was able to dwell in the beauty of the day and focus on those who were breakin’ their backs to figure out how to get the job done. I hope to hold onto this lesson and when I have the opportunity, when I’m faced with inconvenience or difficulties in the company of those in my own culture, I hope to take the time to breathe and make the decision to rid the air of useless dialogue and just find a way to work together. There are so many times that we talk just to talk, or argue just for the sake of arguing…when you can’t do that with someone all that’s left is just being. Being together whether it’s easy or not, whether things are going as planned or the process is taking you in an unknown direction- focusing on the solution instead of the problem is the only road to take.
On the surface the day was incredible- we worked our tails off UUKUMWE (together) and ended the day with an amazing success. Underneath it all, unbeknownst to my community, my self was probing and prodding to test my way of thinking, feeling, reacting, communicating- pushing me to another level of being. The universe presented an opportunity to grow and I am so grateful. The seeds that were planted years ago have been continuously watered by friends, family, colleagues, mentors and on that Friday, a new understanding was born inside of me.
FRIDAY WAS AMAZING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! My attempt now to relay the magic that happened last Friday will not do the experience justice! But I’ll try my best:)
First of all I have to share that now now my little neighbors are on my front stoop playing Uno. They’ve been over almost everyday for the past week or so playing, having dance parties, coloring, reading and the like. Now they don’t even knock anymore which is great, hilarious, and a bit obnoxious all at the same time:) They make me laugh and can entertain themselves just by looking at all the weird ‘merican stuff in my house so it’s all good. Yesterday a few of them even started cleaning my house when I was doing the dishes!! I gave them the book Little Mermaid last week and Saturday morning we watched the movie and ate popcorn. I told the girls that in my home we always eat popcorn when watching movies and Ndapandula said “yeah, I’ve seen it in the movies!” PRICELESS! Oh, and the gifty’s are pouring in….Tuesday Ndeshi brought me sweets and the Monday before Marta and Maria brought a small bag of Mahangu- the traditional grain used to make porridge. Fuuuuuuuuuuunnny :)
Oooooooooooook now for FRIDAY!! First the story, then a reflection…
Ideal Scene: a 4 hour procedure to offload a 12meter container full of bikes off of a truck bed with a front end loader and 6 poles.
Our Scene: an 11 hour day, 9 hour procedure, and 4 poles. Ready, GO!
The Uukumwe Nkurenkuru Bike Shop has been an idea since January. We’ve discussed as a group, identified it as a need for our community, written a proposal, chosen a management team, met with the project coordinators from the capital, received news from our partners at Bicycles for Humanity (THANK YOU JOSH PACE!) that the container full of bikes was being shipped to arrive in country on June 21, waited as the container went through a revamping adding a door and windows so it could function as a shop and then finally….the call: the container was on it’s way!!! At 4:00pm Thursday the truck left Windhoek and began the 12hour journey north to Nkurenkuru. At 7am Friday morning I got the call that the driver was in Rundu, now just two hours away, the final stretch on the dirt road. I called our team and met them at the town council to receive our plot of land for the shop.
Filled with excitement, this is where the chaos started:
We’d been asking for land since April, checking in almost every day, and just Friday we were granted a grassy plot with thorn bushes strewn throughout. So, we got the tools from the garden and started clearing the land so we would have space for the truck to offload the container. In the midst of hacking through the thorns we heard a rumbling in the distance….looking up towards the road we saw a huge orange truck tearing down the path and so we ran to the road to flag it our way. This is when the delivery of the container became the towns entertainment for the day- everyone wondering what it was doing all the way out here, gathered around to see what would become of it. Now we had to get the front loader from the town council and poles to help offload- NORED, the electric company said we could borrow telephone poles from them but had left early in the morning without handing them over so now we were on the hunt. The longer the truck was here the more we had to pay and we didn’t have the budget for that so we really had to buckle down and find these poles. We split up and after an hour and trips to homesteads, NORED, the hospital, hardware store, grocery and even looking in the bush we managed to find four poles. All different sizes, three of them wooden, one a steel pipe. Now that we had the poles we needed a truck to transport them to the container- I saw one in front of the hardware store and asked for his help but after refusing we spotted a tractor from the hospital- the guys and I loaded them up and finally made it back to the container thinking now it was all downhill from here!
At 10:00am we started the offloading process: no one here had ever done this procedure before; not the truck driver, off loader, myself or anyone else present so I was on the phone with Michael in Windhoek getting the play-by-play, I showed the off loader a video of what it’s supposed to look like and everyone standing around had their opinions too. Eventually we hooked up the chains and started to lift the container to get the poles underneath in order to role it off the truck. The first attempt left the off loader airborne! Third and fourth attempts almost knocked the container sideways off the truck- three hours later with only one of four poles underneath, the off loader driver decided it was time for his lunch break unless we were going to pay overtime….!!!!!!!!! He locked up the machine and left, saying he would be back at 2:00. I was a bit crushed knowing now we would definitely go over the time budgeted to have the truck here and with no real end in sight. Michael had suggested a last resort could be to break the lock of the container and start unloading bikes to lighten the load- I suggested this to the group and with a single nod and a glimmer of hope in their eyes we got a rock and pounded off the lock.
Opening up that container was like Christmas morning!!! To see the look on the faces of these folks who have waited, planned, dreamed about this project coming to fruition….to hear their gasps as they soaked up the view of hundreds of bikes they would be unloading, spending the next 6 weeks repairing getting ready for selling and riding… to watch little kids walk by on their way home from school with utter amazement and confusion….it was incredible! Moses and I jumped up in the container and started unpacking one by one- with each bike he would say “ah, this one, this one is mine!” but then the next one would be even nicer and now that would be his….Markus joined and the three of us passed out all of the stuff that the folks in Canada loaded up for us not just bikes but spare parts, water bottles, national geographic magazines, shirts, bike stands, a table and shelves for the shop, tools, tires, lunch bags, even a lone softball! And my personal favorite….a huge piece of cardboard spray painted with a peace sign and the message “To Namibia with love from Canada!”
It was the most amazing two hours of my life thus far- we unloaded, laughed, dreamt about the possibilities we had with this shop, smiled at every single thing we passed from inside to the folks helping on the ground, took pictures and just ENJOYED EVERY SECOND!! After we unloaded a third of the truck we decided it’s best not to take them all out because we would never get the bikes back in! Around 3:30 the driver returned and this time we meant business: the front loader lifted the container higher and we got all four poles underneath then it attached itself to one end, the truck driver was in the other and at the count of three the truck started to drive forwards allowing the container to roll off. All of a sudden the container came crashing down on top of one of the poles smashing it to pieces and BLAMO the Uukumwe Bike Shop was in it’s new home!!!! Cheering and screaming and more pictures commenced and the smiles were endless. Now we just needed to reload the goods, buy a new lock and end the day. Of course that took another three hours and we couldn’t fit all the stuff so we loaded a hospital truck with everything leftover and now my sitting room is full of bicycle goodness:) Now it was dark, everyone was sore and exhausted from the long day of working together. Markus and Moses showered at my place and we discussed the possibility of them camping out to protect the shop since the lock could just be broken easily. Eventually it was decided that we’d just hope for goodness to surround it throughout the night!
The next two mornings Beatilda called me before 7am letting me know everything was safe…..she had been watching during the night and was back at post by sun-up:) WHAT A RIDE!!!!!! :)
Now for a reflection…. The day was INSANE, nothing went as planned, everything took longer cause we were walking to and from places to find poles, trucks, locks, bread and water cause no time for a lunch break for the rest of us, we couldn’t call anyone to communicate after 11:00am so if we had a message for someone we had to go find them and Michael could no longer assist from afar. Some folks in the community whose help we desperately needed were not finding it in them to assist while those of us involved in the project and random kids from the village helped all day. So many times we needed a break from folks, just to borrow poles or transport, it really was simple for them to help and after-all THIS WAS FOR THE COMMUNITY!!! Why were people being so stubborn?? At the beginning of the day when we got the plot of land that needed clearing, I wanted to express my frustration to Tate Shyinga. Weeks ago he had politely told me to stop bugging him when I asked everyday about our plot. I was doing that because I didn’t want to be stuck when the truck arrived with no place to put it and here we were, the very day of the arrival, having to cut down small trees! I realized that because of our language and cultural barrier anything I would have to say to him would just not translate- we would go around in circles, and expressing my frustration (and even a bit of anger at this point) would only negatively affect me. He wouldn’t wear my emotions, we wouldn’t have a dialogue about professional courtesy or how messed up it is that he couldn’t corporate with us. Hell, he was the guy who knew how to offload and instead sent someone who didn’t know what he was doing, didn’t know me, didn’t know the project- the guy who left for the three hour lunch break…just unnecessary complications and for what? This shop was for the community, not some business venture that he wasn’t going to benefit from…..why couldn’t people just join together and throw us a bone!
Two things:
1) the bone that was thrown to us was all the stumbling blocks in our way. Every time we got shut down it brought us closer. It caused is to think differently, find new resources, rely on one another (as the uukumwe committee) in a new way and just get it done. I can’t imagine it going another way actually….now folks had the sense of accomplishment that motivates one to work harder. We had worked for this shop not just accepted a free gift. Now it was theirs. It was ours.
2) The most fascinating thing I realized from this experience was the unnecessary space emotions like frustration and anger take up. As mentioned, I could have argued with folks when they didn’t help, I could have engaged people in a frustrating dialogue of finger pointing and reprimanding but it wouldn’t have done any good. It would have left me yelling at a brick wall because there was no room for arguing, only room to figure out how to finish what we started. I just kept thinking if something like this would have happened with a bunch of Americans there would have been so much unnecessary dialogue about who messed up where and when- we would have had the same result, a container off loaded to start a bike shop, but it would have been tainted by negativity and blaming. Point being- we…I, always have a choice about how to react to any given action. My dad has talked about that for years and I understood it before but Friday it became real to me in a new way. What struck me was not only the choice but the process of making the choice. Choices like deleting a text message meant to ‘put someone in their place’, counting to ten and coming back to center in order to find solutions instead of naming problems. I felt myself naming the emotions of anger and frustration and smiling at them while I made room for patience, compassion, and understanding. I realized that if I had the ability to communicate my frustration I would have….but by having that outlet being taken away from me I was able to take a few steps back and really realize just how counter productive it would have been. By letting go of my frustration I was able to dwell in the beauty of the day and focus on those who were breakin’ their backs to figure out how to get the job done. I hope to hold onto this lesson and when I have the opportunity, when I’m faced with inconvenience or difficulties in the company of those in my own culture, I hope to take the time to breathe and make the decision to rid the air of useless dialogue and just find a way to work together. There are so many times that we talk just to talk, or argue just for the sake of arguing…when you can’t do that with someone all that’s left is just being. Being together whether it’s easy or not, whether things are going as planned or the process is taking you in an unknown direction- focusing on the solution instead of the problem is the only road to take.
On the surface the day was incredible- we worked our tails off UUKUMWE (together) and ended the day with an amazing success. Underneath it all, unbeknownst to my community, my self was probing and prodding to test my way of thinking, feeling, reacting, communicating- pushing me to another level of being. The universe presented an opportunity to grow and I am so grateful. The seeds that were planted years ago have been continuously watered by friends, family, colleagues, mentors and on that Friday, a new understanding was born inside of me.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
