About Windhoek

Hello everyone. Here I am in the capital city of Windhoek where I have been staying in a guest house for a few days, getting to know a bit about Namibia and preparing to travel up to the very far north. I am with two other school leaders from England. We have sorted out all the things we need like banking facilities. The photo shows one of the training sessions with Irene from VSO at the office in Eros, Windhoek. VSO stands for ‘Voluntary Service Overseas’.

We had a really interesting tour around some of the areas where people live in Windhoek today. There is a very posh and affluent area with big houses. Mostly, the people who live in these houses have white skin. There is a much bigger area called a township where most of the people who live there have very dark skin and are known as black people. These houses are well-built, made from bricks, but not as grand as the white people’s houses. Then we visited a very, very large area, called the squatters area where everyone is black and the houses are literally small huts made of corrugated iron. Many of the people here have come to Windhoek from the countryside, looking for work. The homes look very temporary, but people live in these for a long time.  The last area we saw had houses which were neither very rich, nor very poor. The people who mostly live in this township are called ‘coloured’ people, which means that the person has some mixed race in their family history. People are happy to identify themselves as coloured – here in Namibia it is ok to refer to them in this way. It was very interesting to see such a big contrast between white, black and coloured people's homes. There are some black people who live in the area with mostly white people, but not many. There are no white people who live in the township where black people or coloured people live.

Today we are travelling overnight on a bus, setting off at 6.30pm, and are due to arrive,1250 km later, at 10.30am the next morning. How many hours travel is that, and how many miles? We will travel through a game park in Caprivi in the early morning and I shall be looking out for elephants!