Christy in Namibia - Peace Corps

The time finally came. After two years living in Namibia teaching full time at Oshikulufitu Combined School, my service has ended. It is amazing how fast it all went. On Friday, I had to say goodbye to all of my learners and colleagues… it was a very emotional day. The entertainment committee at school prepared a going away party with all of the colleagues for the afternoon after school got out. I wore my Oshiwambo meme dress and went to school both excited and deeply sad about saying goodbye to my learners and colleagues. I had a fun day taking loads of pictures with so many kids and saying a final farewell. I went into each of the grades that I taught during these past two years and said farewell to all of my kiddos and wished them all of the best in their futures. I also gave each one a sweet and a small note… they were thrilled about the sweet! A few of the learners stood up to give some short words of goodbye thanking me for being their teacher for two years and mentioned some o...

Greetings, all. It's been a while! I've been doing my best in these last months to savor every minute left in Namibia. Now the time has finally come and my two years of Peace Corps service are nearly finished. Some days, COS (Close of Service aka the end) felt like it couldn't come soon enough; others, I have spent truly happy and at ease. I am now in my final week in our village. I depart Oshikulufitu to head to the capital for processing out on Sunday. I'll be in Windhoek for a few more days before beginning my whirlwind two months of travels before my eventual return to the States. Now, back to the title of my post. A question I've been getting a lot lately (from fellow PCVs, friends back home, and family alike) is some variation of "So how are you feeling about coming/going home?" Whoo. That's a big question. My tl;dr version is "All the feels." But as my blog readers well know by now, I'm longwinded. So, I'm here to give you ...

Let me start off with an apology, as is the norm with my posts. This one is a bit more delayed than most... As I mentioned, my parents came to visit Namibia back in January; however, while recently checking through old posts, I realized that I never actually uploaded the post I wrote about their visit to my blog! I wrote it in a word doc on my computer and forgot to upload once the wifi was back up again. So, here's a post I wrote in January about my parents' visit :) I hope you enjoy! *** Alas, onto the final leg of our holiday travels and the final blog post about them! After our fantastic time with the whole family in SA, my parents and I headed up to Namibia for them to see my beautiful host country. Another big plus was that my host family from training was able to join us for most of the trip as well! We flew into Windhoek on the evening of New Year’s Day and hopped in our rental car after a slow start on the morning on the 2 nd . First up: Sossusvlei. The larges...

Hello all! Hopefully you had a chance to check out my last post all about Serve 2 Lead. This week's post (yes, I'm posting two consecutive weeks!) is about the next youth development project that I have coming up. As you may remember from last year, I am a camp facilitator for Camp GLOW (Girls and Guys Leading our World), which takes place each August in Windhoek. It's a week-long camp for 44 Namibian school children from all regions to develop their leadership, communication, empathy, and teamwork skills. It also focuses on breaking down the gender norms and tribalism that is very present in Namibian society. The camp is completely free for learners, so that cost won't prevent them from gaining a life-changing experience. Most of the kids who attend camp are categorized as "Orphans or Vulnerable Children." Our fundraising page was recently posted, so if you're interested in making a difference in a child's life and development & supporting our...

Happy Friday, blog readers! I'm so excited to tell you all about Serve 2 Lead (S2L), a leadership development program that I've been a part of for the past 9 months or so. I talked about it a bit in my last post entitled "Time Flies", but I'll give a quick recap here in case you missed the last post. In November last year, a team of fellow PCVs and I met with many local stakeholders, including representatives from local schools, the Ministry of Gender, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Health, and the Vocational Training Center. Together, we brainstormed areas where youth in our region are lacking skills. Two of the largest needs that we came up with were leadership skills and entrepreneurship/creative thinking skills. After this meeting, my good friend and fellow PCV Mandeep came up with two program ideas targeting this need. He reached out to the PCV community in our region to see if anyone was interested in developing the programs. I jumped on the oppor...

Hello, earthling blog readers! Sorry for the huge dearth of posts. Life happens. Blogging doesn't always! Here are some month by month updates and such since I last posted. March School started again (post-flooding) at the very end of March. Things were hugely hectic as we had a lot of class time to make up for due to the missed lessons during flooding. I taught double my normal teaching load every day for the end of March and first half of April. I taught after school or during free lessons as well as teaching nearly every Saturday. It was seriously crazy for a while there! April See above. Exams started mid-April for the learners and cramming in final topics was hard work, but the kids and I all survived! It all paid off because they generally did quite well on their exam. The very same day that my kids wrote their exams, I grabbed my stacks of marking and hitchhiked down south to welcome the new group of Community Economic Development (Entrepreneurship/Business) PCVs. Th...