it's summer time in namibia

I stole the title idea from courtney but it seems fitting because it is hot here, but I'll take this over the freezing weather in valpo right now
so namibia is beautiful
we flew in last wednesday and the airport is in the middle of no where so we had a nice long drive to windhoek and enjoyed the scenery. so apparently there are mountains here, lots of them and it is so nice to walk around and every where you look there are mountains (pics will hopefully come soon if I can ever get on with my comp). the 20 of us got settled in to our very nice house and met our profs and the CGE staff.
Some things I've done and seen:
we took a tour of windhoek and learned some history of the segregation and apartheid within namibia. we drove through katatura (part of the city) which was really hard to see. it is an informal settlement but there are street names and everything. thousands of tin shacks were everywhere, too short for people to stand up in and I'm sure multiple families living in each one. it's really sad too because the government isn't doing anything about it. at least in south africa they are building houses for people for free, here they just seem to ignore it.
we went to the soweto market (yes soweto is in south africa) which is just place in katutura where people have little shops and sell different things. we ate lunch there and helped a lady make fat cakes which was fun. the people seem a lot more hesitant to us here than they did in south africa becasue there is still a lot of race problems. so people look at us and seem uneasy but once they know we are americans (and not afrikaaners) and are okay then they warm up a lot. we learned some prices of different things and then calculated the costs for them in us dollars for an average namibia worker and a liter of milk would be US $ 13 and a roll of toliet paper US $ 3.50, crazy, no wonder there isn't much of either around.
we had 15 or so students from 2 local (and only ones in namibia) universities for a forum/social get together. that was really cool. It was fun to meet some namibians our age and get their perspective on things. some of them took us out to a club that night which was fun.
Sunday we went to this ridiculously long church service (3 hrs) and basically none of it was in english except when they invited us up to introduce ourselves (imagine 400 people turning to look at the 5 of us) and then later one of the pastors came over and interpreted the sermon for us which was really nice. Afterwards we met a lady who we asked where we could get food and she took us to her house then went to the markets to eat with - how incredible!
Monday was my first day at my internship and well... it is at a place called Beautiful Gate and it is a really cool organization started by this couple from South Africa. It has 61 kids (3 to 6 year old) during the day who come and learn some basic english and other things and get a good meal or two in them and get some love and play time. A few days a week they have an after school type program for older kids but unfortunately not on the days I'm there because little kids can make me nervous sometimes. Anyways my supervisor was only there for about a half an hour then I just cleaned dishes and floors and made jello and stared at a tree for an hour and half and watched 50+ kids run around screaming and climb all over me. So not my favorite but maybe it will get better and I have to sit down with my supervisor and set goals and come up with a project to work on so hopefully I will get valuable experience not just screaming kids and making sandwiches and jello experience. It was a little disappointing too that only a couple of the adults are from namibia while the rest are from SA, Holland, US, and maybe australia. C'est la vie, n'est pas? Just have to stick with it for a while.
It was really difficult seeing all the kids though - a lot of them suffer from serious malnutrition, have TB, have HIV/AIDS or their parents do, or are orphans living in abusive homes. And the neighborhood it's in is really sad too, especially when I can leave and come back to our nice house and lots of food.