Entries Tagged 'Namibia' ↓

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Here is a picture of Oranjemund hospital. I had some fine times here both as a patient and as an after-school visitor. I think the after-school activities here were the most interesting but blood and gore appeals to people’s dark side.

My first visit here was when I was born. For years, my father kept repeating the tale about Dr McGregor telling my mum to, “Hush woman and bare doon. Ye shoulda remember that 9 months ago ye were squealin with delight lassie!”

I arrived at a healthy 8lbs and changed my family’s lives from that moment on. I developed asthma. Bad asthma. A desert apparently was not the best place to live as a practising asthmatic so after two years of quack remedies, I made my parents decide to move country.

Having just learnt, by now aged 3 yrs, the art of swimming underwater in an outdoor pool, my parents took the good Dr’s advice and packed up the family to move to the dry cold of Canada.

We went to England from Cape Town by Union Castle boat to UK to say “hello, goodbye” to the family members of my parents who had not yet followed them to Namibia after the war. The boat trip took two weeks to get to Southampton. Apparently onward travel to Canada by boat had already been reserved and paid for. Our family remained in UK a month saying their goodbyes. Unbeknown to them, I had other plans. Heehee!

Two weeks before the Cananda boat was due to sail, I caught chickenpox!

Then the rest of the family caught chickenpox and so were advised not to board the boat for fear of infecting the entire human manifest with the plague! So that was the great Canada Caper cancelled and we returned by Union Castle boat to Cape Town and then back to Oranjemeund. I do not know the details but my dad was given his old job back. Lucky. It’s a Namibian thing.

I have been away too long. I will be back. I need to get earthed again.

It’s a Namibian Thing V

I found another Namibian blog run by Gerard and among many things, this caught my eye:

Gerard says,”Coming back to my article on Sunday dealing with portable applications that you can take along on your USB stick: I’ve just stumbled accross another interesting idea that wraps together the power of the Firefox webbrowser and Tor (which is an abreviation that stands for “The Onion Router”).”

“This combination gives you complete privacy on the road when surfing the Internet: meet Torpark which allows you to surf the Internet without any “nosy services” logging each and every step of what you are doing online.”

Namforum.com

Here is a picture of how Oranjemund was progressing from wooden crate houses to bricks and mortar. The standardisation of the house layout made for quick and ultra economic construction.

What you are looking at are the “Guest Houses” where visitors on mine business could stay over. I guess Radisson or the Marriot chains would not consider this as opposition would they?! I used to walk past these houses in later years. They looked nothing like this. They were houses, not these military accommodations!

Little by little the town grew. The brick houses replaced the wooden shacks and so the town took the look of a proper town still in development. Work at the mines was picking up too. The diamond yields were impressive. Quality product was being delivered to the diamond houses in Antwerp and New York.

Prosperity was looming and with it the founding of social amenities was also about to boom. One such sign of the growing affluence was the erection of the Rec Club. Aah yes, the Annual Diamond Ball became the must be seen at event of the year. Mum looked radient, the belle of the ball and dad looked splendidly striking in his tux and bow tie. Naturally I was too young to go. Naturally, mum and dad went. Naturally they thought I’d be safe and sound asleep at home.

Wrong! I was on the roof of the Rec Club looking down at the waltzing couples and howling and hooting with laughter whenever my mum and dad took to the floor to waltz or foxtrot around. They looked so splendid the two of them and I always voted them the best dancers at each of the gala events I snuck out of home to go climb up a tall building so that I could peer down at my parents doing their thing. Dad seemed to be able to make it look like mum was gliding on air as they twirled and spun and cha-cha’d the night away. I was spellbound.

Had the moms and dads looked up, they’d have seen many tiny smiling faces peering down at them from the skylight windows! There would have been hell to pay. But as fortune would have it, we kids were never rumbled. Only in the 80’s did I tell my dad about my nights on the roof each year of the Annual Diamond Ball. He laughed his head off, smacking his thigh in glee at his then tiny but daring son. I think he felt pride and was happy that I actually spent one night each year on a roof transfixed by the razzmatazz of the ball, watching him and mum enjoy themselves. I did. It’s a Namibian thing.

I have been away too long. I will be back. I need to get earthed again.

It’s A Namibian Thing IV

Here is a picture of Oranjemund’s swimming pool. Date unknown but this is where my father taught me to swim at the tender age of 1yrs old. He took me into the water with him and then let go of me and waited to see what happened.

This was a pioneering technique back then. He did not know if I’d sink like a stone and die or do what we now know babies do in water - swim as if it’s their natural environment. I did swim. Immediately. Apparently I stayed underwater showing zero signs of panic and kicked my little legs to gain momentum. For many years to come I preferred being underwater. Even today while underwater I feel as if I am in my element, my universe. But back then, dad took a risk. He shocked his buddies!

My earliest memory of the pool and buildings was when it was surrounded outside by dense lines of of conifers. As a kid we would swim and climb these trees then go and swim again. Our favourite pool games were the dangerous corner touch and the less dangerous multi-bombing.

Bombing entailed getting about ten or so of your mates to line up behind you on the highest diving board and then jumping off in the bomb position immediately one after the other to create and maintain a large plume of water. On impacting the water, each bomber would disperse the area by diving to the bottom either left or right of the impact zone. This ‘game’ was taken from black and white war movies of a Lancaster bombers releasing their payloads over some target. Well to us it was run-of-the-mill sport except when your mate behind jumped too soon and landed on your head. When this type of mishap occurred, and it did many times, it was a bugger to remain focussed to clear the impact zone underwater! But we did and no lasting ill-effects manifested.

The pool was managed by Mrs Van der Hoeven. She loved chlorine. Oh boy was that water chlorinated. This led to many confrontations with my mother. From my perspective, being an underwater swimmer, meant you had to see where you were in order to navigate between the hundreds of thrashing legs of all the other swimmers. Protracted periods underwater with eyes open led to my pond scum coloured eyes going red. And I mean ‘R.E.D’ !

My mother thought this was unhealthy. I on the other hand did not care. I was having fun. Loads of fun. It’s a Namibian thing.

I have been away too long. I will be back. I need to get earthed again.

It’s A Namibian Thing III

Here is a picture of Oranjemund long before I was born. It’s stark. Not a lot of green. In fact there is zero greenery. Look at it. This is what my ‘pioneering’ parents came to from the UK after WW2.

No rationing or a cottage in sleepy village in Oxfordshire for them. No. They’d rather chuck it all in, follow a dream and go live in a box in the sand in the world’s oldest desert!

I cannot relate to their determination to seek a new life in Africa if meant going to live in a pondok. But they’d just come through the war and I suppose this was the lesser of two evils maybe?

Truth is, my dad had skills that De Beers needed. They, (De Beers and the township elders) did not know it but my mum had skills and talent too. Her talents would reveal themselves in later years once the township matured into a fullblown town and childcare became an issue. She founded the nursery school. Its’ a Namibian thing.

I have been away too long. I will be back. I need to get earthed again.

It’s A Namibian Thing

Here is a picture of where I was born. It’s beautiful. An oasis of green. Look at it. Take your time and see how many key community features you can pick out.

Answers at the bottom of the page.

Don’t scroll down because there are no answers there. How many of you immediatley scrolled all the way down to the bottom of the page? Be honest. You did didn’t you. Tsk tsk!

The brown sandy bits surrounding the town were my playground. My mates and I would spend hours in the desert and we learnt that being barefoot could be hazardous to ones health. Especially if you stopped walking and were stood beside an ankle high dried out shrub with a puffadder curled up beneath it. Its skin ended up being prepped as a band for my scout hat. But it was too short so languished at the back of my sock drawer until eventually almost a year later mom’s shrieks alerted dad and me to the fact that at long last she had found it! I smiled at dad. He grinned back. Its’ a Namibian man thing.

If you read Max’s interview of me, you will learn that the hospital patients, both human and animal, (situated immediately left of the point where the dirt road leading up from the bottom of the picture meets the outskirts of the town proper) featured a lot in my life from birth until I went to boarding school in South Africa. It’s a Namibian thing.

I have been away too long. I will be back. I need to get earthed again.

It’s A Namibian Thing