Living for Disco

I’ve been having a quiet whinge to myself lately about how utterly boring The Namibian newspaper has become. They keep running dreadfully dreary articles about local government elections, or treason trials being postponed. I rely on the newspaper to give me inspiration in times of blogging crisis, and recently I’m afraid it’s let me down.

However, I came in this morning, and saw a headline that gladdened my heart: “Namibia makes debut at world fish fair”. Now I don’t know why, but I find fish inherently amusing. I think I may have mentioned this before. The fact that there is an international fish fair I find delightful. I can imagine them all dressed like Captain Birdseye, sitting around on their stands, surrounded by tuna steaks and caviar, and discussing the dreadful state of the pilchard harvest.

It appears, however, that the International Seafood Expo is a big deal. People come from all over to display the latest fish products, be it the food itself or the technology used to catch it. It’s the place to wheel and deal if you’re in the fish business.

Namibia doesn’t really do fish. Except for pilchards. They’re very big on tinned pilchards. In fact, I believe that Namibia donated a large amount of tinned pilchards to the victims of the tsunami. I kid you not.

Anyway, this is what the Namibian contingent had to say about the visit:

“We had a small stand and no fish. All we had was our confidence in Namibia’s existing fishing industry and prospective aquaculture sector as our point of promotion.

“Miss Namibia 2004, Adele Basson, was also with us and with the support of Namibia Breweries, plus our wooden giraffes, we were able to market our products while being able to offer the visitors to our stand true Namibian beer with true Namibian beauty and some culture.”

Those of you who have not visited Namibia will not realise the significance of the wooden giraffe in Namibian culture. They are the bait used to reel tourists into market stalls. I’m sure the sale of wooden giraffes feeds families from here to Katima Mulilo. They are everywhere. If you go to the check-in gates at the airport, I guarantee you that at least half of the people getting on planes will have enormous wooden giraffes wrapped up in bubblewrap and newspaper sticking awkwardly out of their baggage.

Why exactly they took wooden giraffes to a seafood expo escapes me though. What were they trying to achieve? I can just see it…

“Hello sir. Here, have a Windhoek lager. It’s true Namibian beer!”

“Wow! Thanks. What’s different about true Namibian beer?”

“Well, it’s exactly the same as German beer, except the girl serving it to you is a true Namibian beauty. Albeit of German extraction.”

“Oh marvellous. What kind of fish products are you promoting?”

“Fish products?”

“Yes. That’s why we’re all here.”

“Right. Well, I don’t know about that, but don’t you think these wooden giraffes represent our burgeoning fishing industry extraordinarily well?”

“…..”

It’s getting cold here, and I need closed shoes, as I remember from last year how frostbite feels. I decide to buy trainers. They are warm; they are practical; they look funky with jeans.

I go trainer shopping. Shop after shop offers me a dreary selection of running shoes with absolutely no funk at all. I do find one pair that I quite like, but they cost N$900, which constitutes a third of my monthly wage, and they really aren’t that exciting. Also, they make my ankles look weird.

I am starting to despair, and the shop assistants give my ancient and grubby N$10 plastic flip flops the hairy eyeball every time I ask try on a pair of shoes, as if it’s insufferable presumption to present myself in inferior footwear when shopping for N$900 trainers.

Feeling disgruntled, I decide to try one more shop. I go in and instantly my eyes alight on a pair of brown wedge heeled shoes with flowers stitched onto them. I turn within seconds from grumpy, slobby volunteer with cold feet to ditzy blonde as the phrase “OMG! Cute shoes!” springs unbidden into my brain.

I look around furtively to check that no-one’s noticed the embarrassing, if only momentary, Jekyll/Hide transformation. No-one appears filled with horror, so I try on the shoes.

Three minutes later, I leave the shop, shoe box under one arm. I wonder what has happened to me – I used to be a ‘one pair for every occasion’ girl. Now I’m having to commission a walk-in wardrobe to house all the fucking girly [gorgeous] shoes [which I love].

I think I will go to the doctor.

Right, continuing with the questions… Today I will be answering Uncle Did, who asked “Is your life and work like what you expected when you were still in London, if you expected anything. And are you thrilled to bits or disapointed, or both ?“, and Ann, who said “My big question for you is: Do you “believe” in the work (ie development) that you have been doing for the past couple of years? And can you see yourself staying in this line of work?”

To answer the first question – no. Not in the slightest. In London I had hazy ideas of a healthful and serene existence, in which I would float about in a gauzy haze, probably doing yoga under the plam tree in my yard on a daily basis while children ran about shrieking with mirth, and neighbours popped round for a cup of rooibos. I would rarely feel the desire to buy things, as I would realise that I did not need them, in an airy-fairy Buddhist ‘free yourself from desire’ sort of way. Workwise I think my expectations were even more hazy, but naturally I was going to change the world.

Instead, I live next door to an aging couple, whose idea of socialising involves rapping on my burglar bars and handing me the phone bill. The only thing that runs about in the yard is an overly priapic dog with sinus problems and the mental age of a retarded puppy. I am rarely healthful and serene, although I am getting better at this. Instead I spend far too much time drinking wine with my friends, gossiping and cackling like a fishwife, and I have accumulated several pairs of high heels.

Workwise, I have failed to change the world. I think I have failed at this rather dramatically, which should be considered an achievement in itself. I didn’t expect to have to charge one of my colleagues with sexual harassment, certainly, or to find that trying to fundraise in this environment would be so enormously challenging and frustrating. Mind you, nor did I expect to find myself on such interesting work assignments as this and this. So weirdly, I am both thrilled at the diversity and weirdness of the experience that I’ve had, and the fact that I’ve found out so much about myself, and disappointed that I didn’t achieve as much as I would have wanted.

As to whether or not I believe in development work, that’s a tough question. I think the answer is yes, I do. Despite the fact that in some ways I have become very disillusioned with the whole idea of international development as it stands, I also think that it’s changing in really positive ways. From my own experience, I think that it’s easy for organisations and funders in the North to have an idealised view of how development should work, and it’s often difficult to see why sometimes things are so difficult on the ground. My opinion, more and more, is that you can’t simply go into a community, ask them what they need and then try and give it to them. It has to come from inside, to be done by the people it’s going to benefit, otherwise it’s never, ever going to work. Much grassroots development work, particularly in terms of funding, is so tied up in bureaucratic red tape and administrative nit-picking that sometimes the project changes out of all recognition, simply because the donors require it to be a certain way. This simply does not work. At the same time, perfectly viable projects find it hard to get funding because they don’t have certain components, or look the way people think they should look. I could go on, but I don’t want to send you all to sleep.

I could see myself staying in this line of work – I enjoy fundraising generally, and I’m still really passionate about some aspects of international development. My problem is that I don’t want to go back to London, and London is where the international development jobs are. So, I may have to do something else. I don’t really know what, but I like the sense of freedom that not being restricted to a place or a career gives me. I can do whatever the hell I want, wherever the hell I want to do it.

That strikes me as a pretty good place to be.

A couple of days ago, Heather A asked me whether insects have muscles like we do. I like a challenge, especially when I get to show off about how clever I am at the end of it, so I looked it up on the internet, which is the source of truth and light, as we all know.

What I found out from the internet is that this is a very difficult question, particularly for someone who didn’t even do GCSE biology.

I did a bit of reading, and then I realized that I don’t actually know much about human musculature, so I looked that up. Did you know that the tongue is actually sixteen different muscles? And that the uterus is the strongest muscle in the human body?

Anyway, I digress. There are basically three types of muscles in humans (excuse me if you already know this): skeletal or striated, smooth and cardiac. Skeletal muscles are the ones we control in order move around. They contain fibres that are arranged into tight bundles, like drinking straws tied together with string. Skeletal muscles are further broken down into fast twitch and slow twitch muscles. Slow twitch muscles contract more slowly and with less force than fast twitch muscles.

Insects have three kinds of muscle – tubular, fibrillar and microfibrillar (found in moths, apparently). Tubular muscles are found in insect legs. Fibrillar muscles are usually used for flight , and are characterized by large spaces between the fibres. Each fibre is a single multinucleated cell, and so I guess this would answer your question about how many muscle cells they have. Humans have densely packed fibres, whereas insects, at least in fibrillar muscles, don’t, ergo they have fewer muscle cells in each muscle. I hope that this is the case, as I couldn’t confirm it anywhere. It’s purely conjecture. Any entomologists out there?

There are some insects (moths, for example) that have tubular and microfibrillar flight muscles, and they tend to have much slower wing beats – between 4 and 20 a second, as opposed to bees, which beat their wings around 190 times a second.

Also, insects don’t have haemoglobin, so their muscles tend to be grey, or translucent.

So to answer your question, vaguely, I think the answer is yes, they have skeletal muscles, but no, they’re not like ours. I had to stop though, because I kept coming up against paragraphs like the following, which I found on this highly informative website, and which make my brain twitch in distress:

In the presence of calcium, which is released from the sarcoplasmic reticulum due to nerve impulses, myosin ATPase splits ATP during oscillatory work. Stretch itself increases the activity of calcium-activated myosin ATPase - here stretch acts like an increase in calcium. This is also consistent with differences between myogenic and neurogenic systems. In neurogenic systems, each wing beat may be associated with a contraction-relaxation cycle, with substantial movement of calcium out of and back into the sarcoplasmic reticulum. Asynchronous muscles are less sensitive to calcium flux, which is also correlated with reduced development of sarcoplasmic reticulum.

Anyway, it was all very interesting, so thanks, Heather, for that. I will certainly never look at insects the same way again.

In this post, I will mostly be answering questions from Gord and Uncle Did, seeing as the latter also asked about music, and the former requested a review of a gig I went to on Saturday night.

When I first arrived in Namibia, I was enormously excited about the prospect of going to see live music. I asked a few people about the various opportunities to see artists, and who was out there, and I drew a blank. There were some concerts by local Afrikaners, but I don’t tend to like Afrikaner pop music. At the risk of being labeled a racist once again, it generally sucks ass, and it sounds as if it’s been pasted together by a four year old with a copy of A Tune A Day for the guitar and a pot of non-toxic glue.

Over the last six months, there seems to have been somewhat of an explosion in accessible live music by Namibian artists. One amazing guy is Elemotho, who I have now seen five times, and who is always excellent. However, on Saturday I went to see a Namibian legend: Jackson Kaujeua came along to support his equally talented son, Jackson Jnr at the Warehouse Theatre. Jackson’s been on the Namibian gospel music scene since the 70s. He was exiled in the UK and in the US during the war for independence because his lyrics leaned too heavily towards the revolutionary, and he came back in the early 90s. He’s been making music here ever since.

What made it great was the incredible energy they put into the performance. The whole band looked as if they were having just about the best possible time. They got down there in with the audience at the front, and worked everyone up into a dancing frenzy. They sang in Herero, in Damara Nama, and in English. Jackson Jnr’s music is, ironically, a bit more traditional sounding than Jackson Snr, who sings as soulfully as Marvin Gaye in a voice like dark brown gravel.

They seemed to combine their different styles seamlessly, and they both had an incredible stage presence. Admittedly, I think Jackson Snr’s outfits had something to do with it - he changed three times, finishing up in a patchwork leopard/tiger print suit, with a tiger print hat, and a pair of spats.

I remember sitting there, my face stiff from smiling, as they belted out the last number, as the crazy dancing rasta at the front leapt on stage to help with the drumming, as all the dancers just let go, and as the atmosphere just went crazy how fucking lucky I am to have been there, and seen it. I’d like to put it in a box, and keep it for when I’m home.