Living for Disco

“We’ve had a bushfire burning here for five days,” she said.  “Right now, I’m wiping ash off the phone.  We couldn’t see anything at all yesterday - the sun was blacked out. It’s causing really bizarre weather.  It could come into Opuwo any time, and we don’t have an evacuation plan.  It’s a bit worrying.”

“Gosh,” I said, hoping it will have burned out by Monday.  I’m kind of dreading Monday.  I have to drive all the way up to Opuwo, and it takes 8 hours if you don’t stop on the way to rest.  The organisation’s car is a clapped out Toyota with a tendency towards moodiness and rattling.  I have company, but not someone who can share the driving.

The air right now is hot and heavy, and it seems to cling to my skin like oil.  Somewhere nearby something dry is burning, and every day the atmosphere smells more thickly of ozone, smoke and jasmine - a heady combination that settles you into a soft warm pillow of blissful non-concentration.  Not ideal driving conditions when you don’t have to turn a corner for almost 600km.
It’s going to be a slog.  All I need is to arrive into a smoke storm of soon-to-be-legendary proportions, or to have to drive the car through rivers of fire.  I mean, how many rivers of fire am I expected to take?  I’m not wonderwoman, for god’s sake.

Anyway, I shall be away for ten days, doing worky stuff up north.  I will try and check in to provide tales of the unexpected - probably more about heat, cows and dust, and hopefully not about rivers of fire.

Back soon!

I got this little gem from Rob. I’m feeling completely without inspiration right now, to be frank. It’s hot (see, this is the time of year I start moaning about the heat, rather than the cold), my desk is a mess, I’m knee deep in access databases and the mosquitoes are back in town, the stripey little suckers fuckers.

So this was perfect. And it’s all true, honest. Maybe one day I’ll tell you about my stint at the zoo, if you’re lucky. They used to poke chunks of raw meat through the bars, but I was a vegetarian back then, so I had to eat the straw they put down for my bedding. Ah, those were lonely, lonely days, filled with pacing and melancholy…

Also, if anyone’s willing to try folding me more than seven times, you’re welcome to have a go. Please send applications with a photo and motivation letter. And jaffa cakes.

Thank you.

“It’s not a dog”, I said, stating the obvious as I indicated the pile of deformed and twisted canines on the table.  “Those are dogs.  That’s a giraffe.  This is a mouse.  Look at its long tail!”  I was particularly keen to draw attention to the tail.  It took me a few tries to get the calculations right – too much air and it looked like it had suffered a prolapse, too little and it would be a mouse devoid of back legs.

I put the mouse on the table with the rest of the animals, took a swig of wine and began a series of dispiriting attempts at fashioning swans.  My triumph with dogs, giraffes and mice made me convinced that this was not outside the limit of my balloon modeling capability.  How wrong I was.  Half an hour later, traumatized by balloons repeatedly exploding in my face at critical moments, I just decided to drink more and forget the swans.

The orphans are going to be so disappointed when they rock up at the fun day demanding swans, or parrots, or bicycles, and I can only bring forth armies of rodents.  All is not lost though - lots of other people at the balloon workshop/Sunday afternoon excuse for a piss-up were much better than me, producing complex masterpieces that wouldn’t look out of place in the local art gallery, so I may just stick to face painting, like last year.

You know yesterday, when I wrote all about being forced by unscrupulous bankers to keep my precious holiday fund tucked in amongst my underwear?

Well, last night I had a very long and involved dream about coming home to find that all my worldly posessions had disappeared from my house.  Of course, the loss of my laptop, my ipod and all of my clothes did not bother me at all, but the thought of my trip to Mozambique being filched from under my nose made me actually cry in my sleep.

Fortunately, the dream robbers found my underwear drawer rather unappealing and so my stash was still there, but in the process of moving it somewhere safe, they found me and took it off me at gunpoint anyway.

I am going to have to open a bank account if I want to get any sleep at all between now and December.

I went to open a bank account yesterday.  I swore never to do this in Namibia because I just knew that the exorbitant bank charges would turn me homicidal, and at some point I would be arrested for standing outside Standard Bank rending my clothes and hurling empty wine bottles at the inch thick security doors.  I believe I know why those doors are there, by the way.  It’s not to keep robbers out, but to exercise customer control on statement day.

Anyway, I succumbed, mainly because VSO give volunteers on a two year contract a nice little bonus after the first one.  It’s around N$5,000, and I’m going to use it to go on holiday with at Christmas.  Goddammit, I need a sandy beach littered with hot men and a bar that serves margaritas in a big jug, and nothing’s going to get in my way.

I thought, seeing as it’s only September, and I’m not going on holiday until late December, I could put the nest egg safely in a nice little savings account, and have it earn a little bit of interest out of the reach of my sticky fingers.   This is the conversation I had with the nice man at the bank:

Rachie:  Hello!  I’d like to open a savings account please!

NMaB:  Certainly.  What kind of savings account would you like to open?

Rachie:  An exciting one that earns me lots of interest!  What are the choices?

NMaB:   The E-plus savings account, or the Plus-plus Savings account.

Rachie:   What are the differences?

NMaB:  Well, the e-plus charges are cheaper, I think.

Rachie:  What about the interest?

NMaB:  [Looks momentarily confused] Well, there is no interest earned on money in these accounts.

Rachie:  Er, excuse me, what?

NMaB:  Well, we don’t pay interest.  But we do charge you a monthly fee for maintenance of your account.  It’s $4.60.

Rachie:  A monthly fee?  I give you my money, and you charge me for it?  You know, in my country* they offer incentives for you to deposit money in a bank.

NMaB: [Smiles, as if I am vastly humorous and indicates his computer].  I have many emails here from other countries, where the bank charges are much more than in Namibia.

I picture hordes of wealthy Internationals storming the Namibian borders waving cheque books and gold ingots in search of bank charges that won’t bankrupt them and force their families into sex slavery, and figure that that’s probably why Home Affairs haven’t issued any new visas since about January.  They’re terrified of being overrun.

NMaB : Shall we continue?  If you deposit less than N$500 in cash, it is free, but if you deposit more than that, we will charge you 1.5% of the total.

Rachie:  Hang on, hang on.  You are going to charge me more the more money I give you, even though if I give you more money, you pocket more interest, because, let’s face it, you’re hanging on to all the interest that’s accruing on my money, right?  OK, what if I deposit lots of amounts of N$499?

NMaB:  [Giving me a look of disdain I know I well deserve].  It’s worked out on a daily basis.  Anyway, as I was saying, if you withdraw money at an ATM, we will charge you N$4.30, unless you use another bank’s ATM in which case we will charge you N$11.  If you withdraw money inside the bank with a withdrawal slip, that will cost you a million dollars, unless you don’t breathe the air inside the bank in the process, in which case we will give you a N$5 discount….

Of course I made the last bit up.  I only imagined that’s what he said because I was too busy fleeing before I did something stupid, like sign a contract that demanded I give him six pints of my blood as a deposit, or something.

So I cycled home with an envelope full of cash, paranoid that marauding robbers would leap out of the hedgerows at me and divest me of my precious holiday fund.  I made it though, thankfully, so you can all breathe a sigh of relief.

The money’s safe stowed in my knicker drawer.

*I didn’t, as I should have at this point, get up and hit myself over the head for saying the phrase “Well, in my country…”, but I did do it later, when I got home.