Week 7 is here with a new landscape and history to explore!
This week students traveled into the desert to try out their skills at sandboarding, spent two days working as fashion designers, and dove into the complex stories told about the coastal city of Swakopmund.
You heard about this a bit in our last blog entry: last Thursday, we piled into vans and made our way into the desert. Students learned about the complexities of land use from our guides, and how a park was formed just ten years ago to help ease the burden of tourism on the landscape. Students were then outfitted with very stylish safety gear and began the hike to the top of the dunes. Olive, one of our resident mountaineers, reported feeling like she was “summiting Mt. Baker again.” At the top, we learned how to steer, stop, and speed down the dunes. Students ended the morning joyful and very very sandy.
On Friday and Saturday, we headed to the Dantago Arts Center in an informal settlement outside of town. Students worked with elementary school children to design and make clothing from second-hand garments in preparation for an upcoming fashion show. We learned about townships and how community organizations are working to encourage women entrepreneurs. In a debrief afterward, students made connections between our experiences at Dantago and readings from Global Studies, considering the impact of tourism on this area. The second half of the weekend brought lots of town-time explorations of Swakopmund and an afternoon at the beach. In History, students became detectives, finding clues of the past hidden in the architecture of Swakopmund. Once again, students began to build bridges between the knowledge gained in the classroom and experiences they are having as travelers.
This week has had many action-packed mornings followed by restful afternoons lounging in the grass at the hostel, catching up on reading Nervous Conditions for Literature class, or playing with the resident yellow lab, Misha.
On Tuesday, students packed their bags and said goodbye to cozy hostel living. We drove on bumpy roads through the Namib-Naukluft National Park and across the Tropic of Capricorn. The drive was narrated by Ellē, who brought the landscape alive through a geological history of the sands.
At the end of a long day of travel, we arrived at a desert camp, nestled into a canyon ringed by faraway mountains. In the daytime, wide vistas are spotted with oryx, and at night with zebras. Far away from any city or town, the stars fill the night sky in a dazzling array.
Next up: midterms, welcoming Aunge, and a trip down the Orange River!
– Sophie Love-Webb, teacher
