Lessons from the Coast

I It's been a whirlwind and without internet connections (except in a few restaurants), we haven't had a chance to post about our experiences -- what we've seen and what we've learned.  

This seems counterintuitive, but the trip to the coast takes you from semi-arid to full out desert. With all that ocean, it is dry, dry, dry.  The fact that the ocean current running south to north is very cold results in the formation of lots of clouds and fogs that roll inland.  There are desert organisms in the Namib desert adapted for collecting fog as their sole source of water!  The cold ocean currents bring plenty of nutrients up fro the ocean floor and the Namibian coast is highly productive - much more so than the nearby land.  

Our first afternoon in Swapok (as Swakopmund is often called), we toured the black township of Mondesa, constructed during the apartheid era, and the neighboring informal township (shanty town), called the Democratic Resettlement Community (DRC), which started in 2001 as a temporary resettlement area for people waiting for subsidized housing.  The influx of rural people to urban areas over the past decade has overburdened the city, just as in Windhoek.  The streets of the DRC are wide and orderly, and the government has supplied street lights, communal community water spigots and communal pit toilets.  So ordered and yet so disordered.  The failure of the system to keep up with the incredible demand for housing is a constant. And some of the newer government homes are as small as what the apartheid government built.   Yet we've learned that it is so much more complicated than what it seems at first.  A portion of those living in the shanty towns can actually afford a home in an established neighborhood, yet choose to send money home to their families instead of living in permanent housing.  

One message coming very clear is that with every issue there are shades of gray.  A good example of this is what we've learned about rhino horns.  Nambia, by creating conservancies where the wildlife is an asset to the community and managed by the community, has had less of an issue with poaching than in other countries.  Rhino poaching does occur, however, and an earlier speaker (Chris Brown) told us of the current debate around whether or not to allow trade in rhino horns that are harvested  from live rhinos (the horns regrow so could be seen as a renewable resource). Rhino horn would be managed using the same model as the diamond trade.   We heard from Jeff Muntinifering from the Save the Rhino Trust while in Swakopmund who pointed out that a lot of work is being done on the demand side and to start allowing any trade will send mixed messages.  Our sense was he did not think it a good idea to allow any trade.  

In some places we see strong connections to things in Minnesota.  In central Swakopmund is a large statue commemorating German losses during the fighting with the native populations in 1904.  Just as we have come to talk about the Dakota War in Minnesota in a different a way, acknowledging the right of the Dakota Souix to have defended themselves and their way of life, there is a movement here to change the way the conflict in 1904-08 is acknowledged and represented. It was just this year, more than 100 years after the massacre of thousands of Herero and Nama people by imperial German troops that Germany has acknowledged that it was a genocide.  (And one that involved the use of concentration camps and experimentIon).  We met with an activist working hard to get the monument sent back to Germany.