Cultural festival

When there’s a holiday in Namibia, usually celebrations will only happen in one town in the country. And that town is selected depending upon who can pay for the festivities. Needless to say, Opuwo won’t be hosting any of the holiday celebrations anytime soon. So it was a real treat for me to hear that there would be a cultural festival in Opuwo. So last weekend I made my way over to the soccer field where the festival was taking place and settled in on one of the bleachers to watch the festivities. When I got there some important people were speaking and welcoming us to the festival. With Opuwo being the regional capital, of course there isn’t just one language spoken. So after welcoming us in English, they moved on to speaking Otjiherero and then lastly Khoekhoe (the click language). And with every new speaker they repeated this process of translating in all the languages.

A few hours later, the traditional dances finally started. 

With each tribe doing different dances, they all really varied in their form and type of dance. It was also really neat to see them all in their traditional dress too. With Opuwo being the spread of a National Geographic magazine, it’s not that I don’t see people in traditional dress every day, it’s the fact that here they were showcasing their culture and out of the every day environment. Previous to this festival, I haven’t taken many pictures, if any, of the Himba and Herero people in Opuwo because as part of their culture (specifically of the Himba culture), it’s rude to take pictures of them. But at the festival, I felt comfortable enough to take pictures of the various tribes, as it was a cultural festival.

Foreign aid and what it's doing to Namibia

I have just started to read this book called “Dead Aid” by Dambisa Moyo that was recommended to me by another PCV. (Side note: Thanks to my sister Sarah and her husband for the Amazon gift card they got me for my birthday so I can read all these fabulous books on my Kindle!)

Okay, now back to the book.....It’s about foreign aid in Africa and how it can affect a country and even a continent. In just the few short months that I’ve been here I have seen a lot of the effects that foreign aid can have on a country, both positive and negative ones. With Namibia obtaining a middle-income country status, it has caused some organizations to leave Namibia and others to readjust their funding. Medicos del Mundo for instance, an organization providing healthcare access to most vulnerable populations, left Namibia in November 2010. VSO has announced that they’ll be slowly leaving the country over the next two years, and many other organizations have also started to rethink their funding. Many of these organizations that have left or are in the process of leaving have decided to leave because they want to concentrate their efforts on countries that are more in need.

With many organizations in Namibia and even government ministries depending upon this foreign aid it can start to look like a disaster. But my first question is this, why ARE all of these organizations and government ministries depending upon this aid from overseas? I realize that Namibia has only been an independent country for the last 21 years but there also has to be a reason why it just obtained a middle-income country status. I’m not saying that the whole country is middle-income, because I know that’s definitely not true, but if the World Bank analyzed Namibia as a country and came up with this income status, there has to be a reason.

So when Namibia has been used to receiving all of this funding from outside sources (and in some ways have become dependent on it) and they start to pull out and leave the country because of the middle-income status that the country now has, it certainly causes a fruit basket upset. For instance, shortly after Medicos del Mundo left Namibia, there was a shortage of condoms in the country. That means that government clinics and hospitals weren’t able to distribute condoms in their facilities because there weren’t any condoms to go around. Can you imagine?? So that’s where we’re at now.

With no news that Peace Corps is leaving the country, I am hoping that through this book (and maybe some suggestions by colleagues and other volunteers) I might be able to help start changing this situation in Namibia. This country has so much potential and I would love to see it succeed and grow from this. Because really who knows what positive growth could come about in five or even twenty years. It could happen!