In Spring 2005, Raleigh International, a volunteer group from the UK, came to Courtney's village to build a playground.  Following is her description of their work, and a letter of thanks.

July 2005

Having Raleigh International in Anker for three weeks to build our school’s first playground felt like a miracle from the first moments the 17 volunteers from the UK and Namibia set foot in the village. I use the term “set foot” literally because they had to walk the last 5 kilometres of their journey to Anker, and I use the word “miracle” because they almost didn’t make it. During the rainy season, the Onguati River, or riverbed, located just outside Anker changes from an easily traversable patch of rough road to a sandpit whose crossing demands a 4 x 4, often along with the assistance of all of the passengers, all of the neighbours, and all of their donkeys. And if that doesn’t work, you have to sleep at the river. During the rainy season, sleeping at the river becomes one of the serious things that people joke about. For the Raleigh volunteers, sleeping at the river was a harsh but somehow proper introduction to Anker and to Namibia as a whole.

The next day, after unloading all of the playground-building materials and reloading them onto vehicles on the other side of the river, and after walking the rest of the way in the midday African sun, Raleigh International finally arrived and were given a gentler but equally proper welcome to Anker, replete with cultural singing and dancing and lots of goat meat.

Then, they got to work on the playground. These volunteers put my own increasingly indolent idea of a workday to shame. From the first light of day to the last, they poured their hearts and sweat and probably also a little of their blood into what quickly began to look like a fabulous playground. Naturally though, the playground-in-the-making wasn’t nearly as interesting as all of the strange, new people working on it. Anker had never hosted such an international presence, and everyone was eager to find out who the volunteers were, where they were from, and why they spoke such funny English.

When the volunteers weren’t honing their new construction skills, they were happy to share their lives and talents with the kids and with the community. We had everything from gymnastics classes and egg carton butterfly art projects with the kids to obscure Bob Dylan song sing-a-longs with my community English classes. Story time was also a big hit, and trying to understand a couple of the volunteers’ thick Liverpool accents became a fun but challenging exercise both for my English students and for me.

The Anker kids were also very happy to share their own talents with Raleigh. The volunteers were regularly entertained while they worked by kids singing, dancing, playing, and when they got tired, staring. Two of the volunteers also celebrated birthdays while they were in Anker. How many people from the Northern Hemisphere can say they spent the first day of their 18^th year in a rural African village surrounded by children singing happy birthday to them in Khoekhoegowab? How many girls from rural Oklahoma can say they’ve been lucky enough to be around to witness it?

Raleigh International made a great effort to get into Namibian culture while they were in Anker. They offered to serve as judges for our school beauty contest -- probably not exactly the kind of traditional African ceremony they were expecting. And they even bought a goat from my principal’s farm, not for a pet, for a bar-b-cue. My principal thought it was hilarious when some of the volunteers wanted to know what the goat’s name had been. And having grown up on a cattle ranch, so did I.

Invariably, when I joined the volunteers on the hill where they camped, I would find a number of them staring up into Africa’s night sky, eyes wide and smiling, in awe of the world of stars they’d never been able to see from city apartment windows, through urban smog and English fog. Most of them had never seen the Milky Way, and none of them had ever seen the Southern Cross. I can only imagine the wishes that must have been made on the abundance of falling stars that rain down on this continent each night.

So, songs and stories and stars and goats – when do the kids get to play already? I’m sure they were wondering the same thing. You can imagine the kind of self-restraint that our kids had to employ to keep from sneaking onto the playground every night after the volunteers made their trek back up the hill. There may have been a few small footprints around the playground each morning, but overall, the kids were very patient. They were very patient throughout the weeks of construction, and they were very patient throughout the extraordinary, extraordinarily long opening ceremony.

During the opening ceremony, there were a couple of near jailbreaks (someone said the magic word – Playground!), but otherwise it was a great success. Lots of school and community leaders came and spoke, and the community turnout was astonishing. This playground project brought our school and community together in ways I had never imagined. It’s interesting how much people were inspired to work together – all in the name of play.

In the moments just before the playground’s official opening, I think the entire crowd was breathless: the kids in eager anticipation of play, the volunteers in nervous anticipation and in fear of 300 children rushing onto equipment they had built, and the teachers and I in silent prayer – “Please God, don’t let any of them fall.” And in the subsequent swirling chaos of children and swings and seesaws, my moment of calm was found, as it always is, in the kind of simple happiness that exists only in the faces and voices of children. Head spinning, eyes darting for injuries, I heard the voice of a grade 6 student and friend, Ricardo. Smiling down at me from much too high up on a swing, he said, “Miss Courtney, it is good!”

I think that sums it up for me too. Thank you, everyone, for helping to make all of this happen. It is very good indeed.  

Courtney Bauman
sunflowercourtney@yahoo.com