grasping for here

it's hot. this morning we went swimming in the river, beside women bathing and doing their laundry. we made sure there weren't any crocodiles before stepping in.

i'm sunburned now. the fan's on. it's after 5:00, and all we did today was eat toast, drink tea, take some photos, swim in the river, walk to the bike shop, walk to lunch, come back to sarah's place.

tomorrow we're headed back to rundu, kerri's town. and then i'm off for a very cool development: i'm going to be visiting some Bicycles for Humanity sites (4 or 5 of them, i think) and taking pictures for a book. the backstory: Giselle, a brazilian journalist, is a friend of a Peace Corp volunteer here. she's been in namibia for the past 5 weeks, interviewing and taking pictures for a 'coffee table book' on the organization Bicycles for Humanity. the organization helps Namibian communities - it trains women in bike maintenance and repair; donates the bikes to nurses, who otherwise have to walk to their home-bound, HIV-positive clients houses. Giselle has some amazing stories about the ways people have become empowered through this project - a woman who never raised a dime for herself who is now a bike race champion; a disabled man is now able to support not only himself, but his family
as well...

after one month of interviews and picture-taking, and just a week before her flight home to Barcelona, Giselle's camera was stolen. so i'm going to go back to the people she met with, talk with them, hear their stories, take their pictures, and then have my photos published in their book. i leave on sunday, will come back to rundu on thursday.

i only have two more weeks here...

i was thinking about what i've seen, and how unsurprising it's all felt. women walk with buckets of water balanced on their heads. they carry babies on their backs, with bright, patterned fabric. they bathe at the riverside. in the car, we pass grass huts. everywhere we go, kids run up to me - a white woman with a camera around my neck, asking for me to take their picture. when we visit a school, they swarm me, fascinated with my white skin. people sit. the sun is red in the morning and evening.

in some strange way, i feel as if most everything i've seen, i've already seen, in a picture... from someone else's trip, from national geographic... it's all so different from life in denver, and yet it's not a surprise; it doesn't feel out of the ordinary because it's how i've always seen the 'landscape of africa'. i think i expected to find surprises - to arrive here, and see that it's different than what i had in my mind. but nope. the only surprise is that discomfort i feel from the interest people have in me because of my skin, race, and nationality. or what i don't understand about those dynamics here. that's to sort out later, i guess.

it's hit that beautiful moment of the evening. outside, someone's practicing the drums. i'm listening to Cat Power on iTunes. in a little while, we're going to cook curry and drink Windhoek Lager. i feel like i'm just touching this place, but don't understand it at all.