Living for Disco

Chez Ntemba. I’ve heard so many bad things about it. It’s where you should only go in a big crowd. The music is good, but it’s where you will be hassled, where people fight. It’s overcrowded. It’s where Juanita went the night she lost her head.

We arrive at 2am, desperate to dance, a mixture of wine, margaritas and beer and making us feverish and excited. Within ten seconds of leaving the car I feel alien fingers shamelessly exploring my coat pocket. I look round in amazement at the blatant thief, who shrugs as if to say ‘worth a try, mate’ and moves away.

It is dark inside, the beat insistent. On our way to the bar we attract brief, uninterested stares. We are the only three white faces in the room – a blonde, a brunette and a redhead, psyched up and needing to party. The music is pulling me to the dance floor, but I look up. Arranged around the balcony are the watching men, perched, looking for prey.

A tap on my shoulder.

“Do you have any cigarettes?” Slurring, swaying, in my face.

“No”

“The one you are smoking would be nice”. His face too close, his eyes red. I back off and he takes it from my fingers.

“Fucking talk to me like a normal person, bitch”, he spits as he walks away. I raise my eyebrows.

“Arsehole.” He can’t hear me, my words lost in the crowd.

The music is perfect. Hip-hop, Madonna, bollywood, Namibian pop, the tunes that have made their way into my brain over the last ten months seeping out through my feet and my hips, lips forming familiar words I don’t understand. Local songs come on and everyone goes crazy, waving arms, spilling beer, jumping, grinding, everyone having the time of their lives. Time slips by with each song, each one better than the last.

We leave at 5am, exhausted, drunk and happy, confetti email addresses spilling from pockets, scattering unbroken hearts across the pre-dawn city.

One of the headlines in today’s Namibian reads ‘STILL NO SIGN OF MICHAEL S’. Michael S’s disappearance also made headline news on Friday, a colour photograph splashed across the front page.

Who is Michael S, you may wonder, and why has his disappearance caused such a ruckus? People disappear all the time, and they’re usually given an inch square spot at the bottom of page 7, underneath the week’s suicide roundup.

The reason that this is such a headliner is that the Michael S is a ship. It’s not a nice little skiff that you can putter about in on a Sunday on the lagoon, or even a fancy, speedy millionaire’s yacht, its bilge tanks awash with champagne. It’s a big, fuck-off carrier ship, approximately the size of Buckingham Palace*, and someone, last weekend, stole it from Walvis Bay harbour.

It emerged from dry dock, freshly repaired after a nasty collision four months ago that sank it. Pretty much before you could say ‘anchors aweigh’, two security guards were thrown overboard (with their luggage – thoughtful people, those ship-rustlers) and the ship steamed off into the night, headed for the dark coastal waters of Angola.

My first thought on seeing it was ‘How the fuck can someone make off with a ship that big, and not be found?’ Actually, that was my second and third thought also. I know the sea is pretty large and all, but if they think they know where the ship is going, how can it be so hard to locate? – it’s not a bloody dinghy.

Does this sort of thing happen a lot?

*probably

I don’t have a washing machine. After years of taking laundry for granted, it seemed like a small sacrifice to make in the name of volunteering for a Good Cause*. So, I didn’t expect to have a washing machine in Namibia, and had resigned myself to two years of wearing my clothes until they turned brown and fell off hand washing in a plastic tub. I optimistically imagined that this was going to finish off my bingo wings once and for all, and that I would return to the UK with beautifully toned arms and a six pack, all as a result of spending a morning on my knees twice a week, scrubbing as a good scrubber should.

It hasn’t really turned out like that, mainly because I have a bathtub. I never realized how wonderful bathtubs could be until I started doing all my handwashing in them. It goes like so:

Step 1: Run an extremely hot bath and dump clothes in.
Step 2: Put OMO washing powder on top.
Step 3: Watch a DVD while all skin and hair in clothes dissolves thanks to incredible caustic powers of OMO.
Step 4: Step into water, now the colour of crude oil, and stomp up and down on clothes.
Step 5: Run a rinse. Dump clothes in. Stomp on them for 30 seconds.
Step 6: Have a cup of tea, and read a book.
Step 7: Run another rinse.
Step 8: Open a beer, and stomp up and down on clothes until bored.
Step 9: Hang clothes on washing line.
It’s so easy.

Unfortunately, no amount of stomping and OMO seems to have any effect on my white towels, or on my pale coloured bedclothes. Handwashing does not remove hair from sheets. It does not get brown ick off white towels. Don’t even ask me how the brown ick got there in the first place – this is Namibia, land of dust and sand. And I took them camping. I am not to blame.

So tomorrow, I’m going to try and weasel my way into my friend Tariq’s good graces, in the hope that he will let me use his washing machine to wash my whites in.

I can’t tell you how terribly excited I am about this.

I have done nothing of any interest lately.  I sit at my desk, then I go home.  Sometimes I go out and drink beer.  I seem to spend a great deal of time in the bath, which makes me feel guilty, because Namibia has hardly any water, and what it does have, I use to soak in to make myself warm because my house is FREEZING.  

Then today, I discovered the giant orange juicer at Woermann Brock.  My life, and the lives of tens of Woermann Brock shoppers, is never going to be the same.  

I got my allowance cheque yesterday, and immediately bounced off in glee to cash it so that I could savour the novelty of having actual money in my possession.  So today I was feeling flush, and when I saw the juicer, looking like a cross between a suction-based torture device and one of those novelty charity collection boxes where you put 2p and it dribbles haltingly down little plastic ramps, I had to have juice. 

I didn’t realize that this was going to cause such a sensation.  By the time the juicer was in full flow, about 20 people were standing around, as if watching a miracle.  It was better than going to the cinema.  Fingers pointed at various parts of inexplicably complicated looking machinery; hushed voices went “Wah!  Look!”  Occasionally an orange would get stuck in the chute, and everyone would go into a frenzy of pointing and banging fists on the machine to try to dislodge it.   

I felt proud to be part of something so extraordinary, but now, after this brief illumination, my life is going to settle back into murky mundanity.   

It’s very sad. 

One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is how I’m going to adjust to life back at home in the UK when my time here is done. Public transport, for one thing, will be interesting. I haven’t been on a bus or a train for ten months. Also, I think I will be aghast at how expensive everything is. N$30 for a cup of coffee!

One of the main things, though, is how I’m going to adjust to a country where HIV is a minor consideration for most people. Quite recently, one of our staff members had the opportunity to go to the Netherlands for a conference. Apart from the fact that it has completely changed his outlook on what he wants to do with his life, and his opportunities, he said that it made him realize what a major problem Namibia has with HIV. By being in a country where it is not on billboards and TV, and where people are largely oblivious to it, his awareness of the magnitude of Namibia’s infection rate has been hightened.

The official statistics for HIV here are truly shocking. One in five people nationally live with HIV and AIDS, and the numbers aren’t changing. In some areas, almost half of all pregnant women test positive. Nobody knows how many children here have been orphaned by the disease, but it’s estimated that one in every eight children here are AIDS orphans.

HIV is everywhere – you cannot get away from it. In every school, in every government building, in every office you see posters and information leaflets. At almost every night out I have ever had the conversation comes back to HIV and the work being done. When it comes down to it, it doesn’t seem to matter how many posters and leaflets and workshops and radio programmes go out about it, or how much it is talked about - people are not changing their behaviour.

Namibia has a large mobile community – jobs are scarce and people need to move around a lot to make money. This means that men and women have boyfriends, girlfriends, wives and husbands in various areas of the country. Men and women still take multiple sexual partners. Many men do not wear condoms, and women have little choice but to comply in many case.  With transactional sex a large number of men are willing to pay much more money for sex without a condom.

USAID’s oblique refusal to fund organizations that deal with condom promotion or sex workers dangerously ignores two important areas of HIV prevention and mitigation. That incenses me. How many of the many men who make these decisions pay for blowjobs in their ivory towers?

Young people are the worst affected. I heard through a colleague about a group schoolgirls in a town north west of Windhoek that decided to go and get tested together at the end of last year. Half of them were positive.

Despite the dire situation, for people here this state of affairs is normal. Despite the stigma still attached to it, AIDS is part of every day life for everyone in this country. And while I absolutely believe that the stigma surrounding the disease has to be demolished, both for the sake of those affected, and for understanding about the disease in general, I often wonder whether by removing the stigma, you also remove the fear. Not that the fear seems to make people behave differently, and in any case, fear is especially dangerous where knowledge is limited.

I suppose that in an ideal world, everyone would understand how HIV is transmitted and how it can be avoided, and in that case there would be neither stigma, nor misunderstanding. Unfortunately, this is not an ideal world, and mixed messages are rife.

I remember once in a school drama show a while ago, a small kid came up to me after the show and asked me whether HIV could be transmitted by sharing knives and forks. I said that no, it could not.

“But,” he said, “What if someone has a sore in their mouth, and they use the fork, and then you use it, and you have a cut?”

Staggered by the question, and unwilling to get into a discussion about viral load in various bodily fluids with a ten year old second language English-speaker, I explained that the virus doesn’t live outside the human body for more than a few minutes, and in any case, the amount of fluid you’d need to exchange would be quite large, so it’s extremely unlikely, but that for hygiene’s sake, you should always wash cutlery before sharing it. He persisted, asking me more and more complex questions, all trying to get me to give him the answer that he clearly believed was the truth. And in the end, to the believer, what is the difference between belief and knowledge?

There are so many myths and half-truths surrounding HIV. Many people believe that ARVs represent a cure. An astounding number believe it is the result of, or can be cured by witchcraft. Child rape is not unknown here, because some men believe that if they sleep with a child, or a virgin, they will be cured.

As for myself, whereas before I came here I was well aware of AIDS, now I’m not complacent. Despite some incautious sexual behaviour of my own in the past, I would now not even consider sleeping with someone new without a condom - and I’m highly aware of how lucky I am to be in a position to insist. I would without hesitation go for an HIV test, and ask my partner to do so, before I considered unprotected sex. And yet, so much still hangs on trust – how do you know that your partner will be faithful to you?

So for me, going back to a country where this is not an every day topic of conversation, where a significant proportion of the workforce is not sick, or dying, or does not have to tend to family members who are sick, or dying, and where abstain is not a word in most school kids’ sexual vocabulary will be quite an adjustment.