Ben Namibia workshop space
October 18, 2006
The fabrication workshop will be in the back of the bicycle mountain.
Alive…and in Namibia
October 17, 2006
I made it to Windhoek, Namibia, with Elizabeth last week. Michael Linke picked us up at the airport after 25 hours of travel and South African Airlines’ loss of all three of my checked bags. We stayed with Michael for a couple of days until he arranged a flat for us close to the BENN shop.
Work is going well, although I don’t feel like I’ve done anything yet. We have hopes for a funding source for the first 4 months, in which we will build 6 ambulances, before we go into production for the rest of the year, looking at an additional 34 ambulances and the development of income-generation technologies. Steel is very cheap here, and there seems to be good availability of tools. I haven’t sourced a bender and dies yet, so I won’t get too excited too quickly.
Our flat is very cute. It’s behind a “main house”, where a very nice family lives. The flat is a little one-story building that has a kitchen, living room, bed room, and bathroom, all in the space of 6 by 8 meters, perhaps. It’s extraordinarily comfortable and has a homely potential that I’m excited about exploring.
Windhoek itself is a pretty large city, with an interesting dynamic around class, race, and language. English is spoken widely here, followed by Afrikaans. I will learn some Afrikaans, but focus mainly on Oshivambo, which is spoken largely in the north and will be useful for field research with HIV/AIDS home based care networks. I had the fortune of riding in a bicycle race/ride this past weekend, which took me through the countyside around Windhoek, for 65 kilometers. It’s amzingly beautiful around the city, with habitation stopping fairly quickly outside of the “suburbs” (poorer neighborhoods, but where the majority of houses still have tin roofs and people have access to services provided in larger cities, like electricity, water, public hospitals…). The landscape is rough. The vegetation reminds me a bit of wyoming, in that there is a lot of brush and harsh angles. The geography is wild. That’s all I describe it as now.
I am happy here, quite excited about the prospects for reaching so many people with medical transportation, and curious to see more of this country in the coming month when I’ll travel north with a yet-to-be-built ambulance prototype.
