Greetings from the world’s end. After driving all day through the desert, we arrived late last night at Wereldsend, “World’s End,” the home base and camp of Namibia’s IDRNC: “Integrated Development and Rural Nature Conservation.” Our hosts, the Notts are a part of this organization. Trevor builds rural campsites; Karen wears a dozen hats, but is immersed presently in helping the Himba people harvest myrrh from the desert commiphora plant, which will then be developed into skin-care products by a major cosmetic company in France.
We have been off the grid for weeks…since our second day in the country, and hope to be able to contact home tomorrow. We have camped every night in the desert, a few nights in bush camps that boasted a bed, sink, and bathroom facilities, but more often on the ground, in bedrolls, with and without a tent. After hearing too many snake, lion, and elephant stories, Tyler and I prefer the added security that 3millimeters of tent canvas affords…an logical indulgence, perhaps.
What a wild country Namibia is. The days are all desert rock and heat (think Arizona), but it’s winter in the desert, so there are miles and miles of knee-deep dried grass, and cold night winds. We’ve really had to bundle up several nights.
The country has a good bit of wildlife: we saw many elephant, giraffe, oryx, ostrich, and even a cheetah stalking springbok on the way down yesterday. I’m now sitting on an open air verandah. A titmouse bird is perched on a ledge, her chatter mostly drowned out by the waaaah of magpie crows in the trees behind this little dwelling/workshop. A five inch long cricket, easily fifteen times the size of ours at home, struts the cement floor; I’d hate to hear him sing. Cancel that last sentence--He just made a fatal error of heading for my open bag. I picked up the first book I could find (The Politics of Jesus) and batted him through the open door. Lizards run across the corrugated metal roof and you want to look really close before you use the long-drop outhouse. It’s great being in Africa again, and the old skills are coming back quickly.
Three lion skulls watch me write from their place on the table top a foot away. One isn’t quite cured, which has me thinking of moving to the other side of the room. This little building is used by Phillip Stander, the world’s foremost expert on lions. He occasionally sleeps in one room, and has a workshop here. Flip darts lions, fits them with radio collars, and tracks them, attempting to document, understand, and help manage areas in the conservancies shared by tribal people with goats and cattle and the desert lions. Flip spends weeks at a time tracking the lions, using his eyes as well as GPS satellites that receive hourly updates from locating collars. Fifteen collars, most well used, hand on the wall before me, some dangling electrical wires and antenna.
In half an hour we leave for a dash to the Atlantic Ocean…the Skeleton Coast, graveyard to many ships through the years. The desert dunes meet the sea, and I’m told there are whales, seals, and fishing too. We won’t spend long there; we’re back here for tonight, then back to civilization (phone and bed) tomorrow night at Karen and Trevor’s place at Omaruru. After two nights’ sleep there, we’re off again for the northern Caprivi district, home of Etosha Park, and a long lane which borders Angola and Botswana. We’ll stay a couple nights with a guy named Philly, who I’m told has leopards watering at his bird bath. Remind me to bath inside.
Our days have been filled with new sights and sounds, with counting commiphora bushes on burnt mountainsides, with visiting new friends speaking strange tongues, but we’ve enjoyed the familiar patterns of scripture reading and prayer too. It’s been wonderful to have time to rest and reflect, to write and to think. I’ve been praying for our family, and friends at Hopwood and elsewhere too. We’ve also taken to reading aloud around the campfire at night: a book of short stories by an Afrikaaner author named Bossman, and Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry.
Our time here has been all I had hoped it might be. We still have a little over a week, then we head to Kenya, where we re-unite with our family. We’ve missed them; and we’ll have lots of stories to tell. Keep us in your prayers. We’ll be off the grid most of the time in Kenya, but will resurface to read your emails from time to time. We love you and look forward to seeing you soon.
Blessings in Christ,
Tim
PS…I didn’t even begin to speak of night sky here…wow. The big dipper is far away to the north, upside down to our eyes. The Southern Cross is midway up in the sky, much higher here than in Kenya. We can barely see Orion laying on his side in the Western horizon. We’ve only seen two planes the whole time we’ve been here, and many shooting stars. If you lived in this place, you’d all be in love with the night.
