I’m off to the Saa Ta Ko camp site, at some place in the Kalahari. It is in Bushmen land and I should be able to see how they live.

Will be back in 3 days.

Will tell you how it was.

There was a ‘braai’ at a friend’s house last night. A ‘braai’ is Afrikaans for barbeque. It was one of those that friends invite friends, and you end up with a crowd of total strangers. Everyone introduces himself around and then people settle down to conversation, drinking and cooking.

If you are poor at remembering names, you end up making conversation with the person with the simplest name to remember. Incidentally, they always seem to remember yours. This is because the people who are horrible at remembering names always have easy to remember names. Theory is, as kids, they never struggled to remember their own names when asked, so the name-remembering lesson was never learnt properly.

The evening was a success. I got to eat and drink to my fill and meet new people in my life.

There is this talented group of two or three people that I always find in every social gathering. They always have interesting stories to tell and usually manage to make an area of central conversation in parties. If you don’t have much to say, you get drawn to this group and enjoy the stories.

I remember one such story from last night. It began with a question from one guy about the most effective way to make people remember simple instructions. The answer that caught most people’s imagination is the pan system. This is how is works.

Buy several frying pans of different sizes and whack the offending person with one when necessary. Maybe, you can have a size 1, 2 and 3 – 1 being the smallest and 3 the biggest. The pan size selected will depend on the seriousness of the mistake.

‘Who left the water running overnight?’ – biiiiiiiiiiing! – a size 2 pan on the butt.
‘Who blew up the house?’ – bwaaaaaaang! – a size 3 pan across the face.

Get the idea?

Another guy told of how a recent daring and ingenious convict escape was staged. This happened when 2 notorious prisoners were being taken to court. Their hands and feet were cuffed. The cuffs to the feet were then joined together in a chain about 1 meter apart. These prisoners managed to escape even under such impossible conditions.

To move, the guy in front would squat and the one behind would jump over him. He would land in a squatting position and his accomplice would then jump over. I think this exercise is called leapfrog jumping? When the prison guards came from buying doughnuts or whatever prison guards are fond of eating, the prisoners had vanished. The search continues.

The same guy told us that when a plain-clothes police officer goes under cover, he wears a police uniform!

We were still in the cattle country meat festival weekend, so maybe this was just another load of bull!

One of the measures of how horribly wrong an adventure had gone when I was young was when a mother lamented over the mischief of her son or daughter (on rare occasions).

When growing up in a village in Kenya, we never had the benefit of technology feeding our curiousity. The closest we got to that, was a weekly half hour drama play in Kiswahili on radio. This was subject to availability of dry cells with enough power for your family radio. If the dry cells were flat and you keep them in the sun for 2 days, they would guarantee that you would listen to the crucial half hour uninterrupted.

In the rest of the time, you had to manufacture your own fun.

During the dry season, it was common for a swarm of bees to suddenly appear and settle on a tree in the village. They often took off after a day or 2. Their departure was always regrettable – watching the dark cloud of honey makers move on to make another person’s day.

The bees usually provided excellent entertainment for us. From where we stood, they usually looked like the back of a big man’s head. We would throw objects at them. If your aim was good and you hit the dark mass, it would disintegrate and then form again after a while. Sometimes, the bees got fed up with us and decided to attack. You had to run – and that was when the real fun began!

With a swarm of pissed off bees behind you, there were several options open.

You could dive flat onto the ground and lay still. In such a case, the bees would first zoom past you. Next, they would buzz around in confusion, most likely asking each other, ‘which way did he go? Which way did he go?’ Finally, they would go back and form the back-of-a-big-man’s-head shape up the tree.

Or, you could jump into the nearest river. The bees would suffer the same confusion and then head back to the tree. In the mean time, you had to hold your breathe under water. It’s pretty difficult to hold your breathe at all under such hair raising circumstances. The sound of the bees behind you is enough to give you a heart attack!

Option number three was to run through a herd of cattle. What resulted was pandemonium. The cows galloped crazily with their tails in the air making a sound that can only be described as baying. Why they had to lift their tails to expose one of the few spots that should never be exposed when under any attack is beyond me! Anyway, they left a trail of damage – especially on the farms.

After the incident, every mother would wait anxiously to learn who was responsible this time. If it was you, your mother would lament loudly, wondering why she had to give birth to you, instead of a piece of pumice stone to scrub the cracks off her feet. You? Wishing that you were never born, as you imagine how your father is going to take it – again.

Such a shot of adrenalin was enough to last you for a whole afternoon. Many of us who lived through that period of creating your own fiction have scars they can show you.

Someone should have made a movie like, ’scar was – attack of the drones’, to feed our imagination!

I just came back from the Gobabis show ground where the meat festival is taking place.

I had gone to sample some beef, but ended up having a kudu lunch! Kudu is a spiral-horned antelope found in the African bush. My kudu steak drenched in barbeque sauce with macaroni and vegetable salad was quite delicious.

This is the first day of the fair, and it promises to be pretty busy, judging by the lack of convenient parking space and the number of people milling all over.

The usual ingredients for a county fair are all there. Exhibition tents, inflatable advertisement dummies, music blaring from loud speakers, and the hot day with a clear sky. Yeah, and the rotund parents wearing ridiculous paper hats accompanied by children with painted faces, eating all sorts of dripping foods came today as well!

The main emphasis being cattle, there were numerous ‘braai’ stands. A ‘braai’ is Namibia’s equivalent of your barbeque. These stands filled the show ground with the aroma of properly roasted meat. Have you noticed that the aroma of roasting meat has a way of pushing up your savagery one degree higher, especially if you are hungry?

As you wait on queue to pay to get into the show, you find yourself having some cruel thoughts. Like, why the gate cash collector has to smile and say a few pleasant words to someone she recognizes, or why the person in front of you does not move to fill the miniature space created when the person in front of them moved a step forward. In your mind, you create a huge physical confrontation with these people involving crowds, the police and even an ambulance and a hero. You.

Or maybe it’s just me?

Anyway, after the lunch, we did a once over of the fair. There are numerous stands selling assorted goods. From Kalahari’s San people crafts to trucks equipped with intercooler and power steering. Between these two extremes, your imagination can pretty much run wild. Water pumps, apparel, animal products, bars and restaurants and even a gun shop selling hunting rifles.

Needless to say, the ‘braai’ stand owners were doing a roaring business. They had this satisfied look as they inspected their customers’ fill themselves up with meat. If you take your sight from your food for a while and look at them closely, you could see the invisible dollar signs etched into their eyes.

When leaving the fair, everyone is stamped with red ink on the wrist. The writing on the stamp reads ‘pass out’. This serves 2 purposes. It proves that you have already paid and don’t have to pay a second time, and reminds you what you should not do when you start drinking in the fair!

The Omaheke region is considered Namibia’s cattle country. When you come to Gobabis by road from Windhoek, you will notice a huge statue of a bull erected at the boundary of the town, proudly proclaiming that this is ‘cattle county’. The statue is quite impressive. If it was golden, I am sure there would be an exodus into town. Of robbers with drool bowls under their chins, insurance brokers with numerous forms for the town authorities to fill, and false prophets with burnt sacrifices to offer!

The highlight of the meat festival weekend is a fair in the Gobabis show grounds. Apart from displaying prime raw material for beef, the brochure claims that there will be fun activities. Like ‘Mr. and Miss. cattle country festival’. I assume this is a beauty pageant. Other activities include an Arabian horse promotion, cultural gala evening and a flea market.

My source of information tells me that I need to ‘think cattle’ in the next two days. Every time I swear or curse, hurl insults or fight, I should acknowledge this weekend by using a cow product. He then proceeded to give me examples.

Now, imagine a wife chasing her husband through town with the hind leg of a calf as a weapon. Or, a landlord strangling a defaulting tenant with the small intestines of a bull. Or even, hooligans disrupting a live musical concert by throwing cattle liver, kidney, and pancreas at the stage. I would hate to soil your imagination further by telling you the other examples he gave.

Holy Cow! Nothing really. I’m just testing my cattle country meat festival swearing skills!

Human and animal proof fences surround the Gobabis town businesses and houses of residence. At least one in every 2 houses has an electric fence and enlists the services of Gobabis Armed Security Services (GASS). The other houses have ordinary high walls, and dogs; the ones with a missing tail and foam in the mouth with anticipation of encountering an intruder.

The bunch of keys to the house I am staying in has a gadget for arming the alarm once I lock the door from outside. Should anything move while I am out, a motion sensor triggers off an alarm at GASS and their elite commandos will surround the house and kick in the doors with AK47 assault rifles at the ready.

This was my first time to see such an advanced home alarm system. I am used to the traditional ‘gigantic man with a huge club’ security system. And of course, Nairobi’s favorite ‘Maasai moran with bows and arrows’ security system. In the first few days, I felt obliged to tiptoe away from the house for at least 15 meters after I press the arming button before assuming my normal walking style. One of my recently acquired friends painted a grim picture of how a false alarm brought him face to face with the GASS armed response team. They kept shouting, ‘Hands in the air! Face on the wall!’ even after he had done both. He remembers 2 things vividly: the sweaty impression he made on the wall of his face, and the machine guns.

There is a church that I usually pass on my way to the supermarket. It has a nine feet high fence – four feet of stonewall and the rest is electrified wires. I always hate to imagine what would happen if I tripped and fell on the fence. I see myself stuck to the fence, spasming in agony as I wait for someone to come along and hit me with a dry twig to break the current flow, or a passing GASS patrol vehicle that would then radio call the office to have the electricity turned off. Chances are that the electricity current would sap all the juices from my body and leave me a dried up shell of my former self. Reason? Residents of Gobabis stick indoors if they can. Remember the sun that scalds like an iron box and ice tray cold nights?

I spent the last weekend in Windhoek, the capital city of Namibia. It is about 200km from Gobabis, the town I am in right now. There are two main options available for you to travel between these two towns. Road or Train. I opted to take the train ride on Friday.

The train has 2 coaches. The sitting and the sleeping coach. The sitting coach has chairs that can be reclined if you want to catch some sleep. It also has a TV, a soda dispenser, plus, this is where the toilets are located. It is cheaper than the sleeping coach, which has 6 bunks per compartment. The bunks are adequate for a person slightly shorter than me to stretch out comfortably while lying down.

The train leaves Gobabis at 9pm and arrives in Windhoek the following morning at 4am. That’s 8 hours for 200Km! My calculator gives me an incredible 25 km/hr! A colleague had made a clever suggestion about getting rid of some troublesome neighborhood dogs: throw some pieces of meat to them all the way to Windhoek. That way, they would run next to the train and hopefully get hopelessly lost in the big city. We actually considered it, but the thought slipped everyone’s mind in the rush not to miss the train.

If you take the seating coach, you watch a Jackie Chan movie (always, I was told) for the first 2 hours of the journey then try to sleep the rest of the time. If you are in the sleeping coach, you try to sleep throughout the trip.

The inside of the train gets freezing cold. I remember at some point it got so cold, I got up to wear the extra pair of trousers and 2 T-shirts I had packed for the weekend. An hour later, I got up again to wear my towel as a scarf and a pair of socks as gloves. I then used my empty bag as a pillow. Of course you sleep with your shoes on, for the obvious reason that the compartments have no doors.

There are some posters at the Windhoek train station advertising the train as the most comfortable way to travel within Namibia. The poster has the picture of a young man carrying a briefcase, stepping from the train, looking as if he is getting into a room for a job interview. Of course his eager wife/girl is waiting to welcome him. If you injected me with a dose of the Energizer battery fluid combined with Red Bull energy drink syrup that morning, I still would not have looked like that young man.

As a colleague had told me earlier, it is always an experience to travel the train. Try sharing a compartment with a family of five that is visiting the city for the first time to attend a relative’s wedding!

I took a mini-bus on the way back on Sunday. The same trip took 2 hours.

By the way, do you know of a way to get rid of a pack of dogs without leaving any trace? Let me know.

Well I’m in Namibia right now, and Namibia is fine.

I am in a small town called Gobabis about 200km from Windhoek, the capital city of Namibia. Gobabis is a not very far away drive to the Botswana border.

I am doing some IT stuff for a local humanitarian organization. This includes securing their computers, expanding the network, building a web site, setting up email services, and developing databases and simple office automation applications. Sounds important, right? But believe me, I am often confronted with other less important tasks as well.

We are in the Kalahari Desert. The season is ‘winter’ right now. Meaning that the days are scalding hot and the nights are damn cold. However, it is worth being out in the cold to watch the night sky. There are hardly any clouds and you can count all the stars there are. A colleague, whose name is Stretch can even pick out the DSTV satellite from the starry maze!

There is sand all around. The sand finds it’s way everywhere – in bed, in the water, in the computer keyboard and in all the openings of your body. The trees are short, thorny and suffer from stunted growth.

There are many huge crickets in the bushes. The crickets are at least 2 inches in length and are quite fat. During the day, they all run towards the road where they are promptly crashed by passing traffic. On the drive from Windhoek, you just stare at the road ahead, and in your head, you hear the crickets scream as you watch them committing suicide. There is nothing much else to look at. At night, the crickets make noise. If a cricket happens to be in your house at night, one of you will have to get out. You know that cricket noise?

There are also snakes! Stretch caught one yesterday. Some colleagues had their photos taken holding it. Guess who didn’t? I have had a problem with snakes since one found me in the bush in the middle of a ‘long call’ when I was a small boy. My scream brought my grandfather and several other people running into the bush. By then, the snake had vanished and I was frozen in an awkward position, too afraid to do anything. Many other people heard about the incident – including some young boys and girls. I think I was traumatized.

I have to go now. One of those not so important tasks is calling.