People keep asking me about the students, and I haven’t responded much because I haven’t really known what to say. I just spent the last two weeks traveling around with the students so now I suppose I should have something to say.
For the most part, I would say I love the job, I love the students. They are amazing and wonderful. Before I started, I did have my doubts about whether I really am that much older, more educated, etc than the students and whether I was really qualified to do this. Some of the students have very impressive resumes and I must admit being a bit intimidated. However, now that I have been doing it a bit, I definitely have started to see that while their resumes are impressive in certain respects and they are definitely very amazing in some ways, in many ways they are still 20 years old, undergraduates, and yes I do have a lot of life experience compared to them.
There have been a lot of challenges for me, but most of them feel like the kinds of things that I will get much better at with experience. For instance, the students view me as an authority figure. They ask me LOTS of questions. LOTS of the questions seem very silly and ridiculous and I feel like, “Why are you asking me this?” Sometimes I’m tempted to give silly, flippant responses, but then I realize they take me very seriously. In the past few weeks I’ve been asked, “Should I buy toilet paper?”, “Can I eat an apple?” “Is it okay that I ate a banana?” “Can you look at this weird mark on my leg?” “Should I tell my host family if I think I have malaria?” “What do I do if I lose my host family’s donkey?” “How long does it take to die if you are bitten by a venomous snake?” “Do you think this is ring worm?” “Can I get some water?” Among lots and lots of other more context specific questions. Okay, so the parents in my blog readership are probably all laughing at me now. I’m finally getting a taste of parenthood. But I guess I figured that these students are practically adults, most of these things they can figure out for themselves, or at least, recognize that I am not a dermatologist. But I’m trying to learn from this to see why they would feel the need to ask me permission to eat an apple and try to ensure that they feel a bit more empowered to make a few of these decisions themselves.
Along these same lines, I often found myself frustrated when we were in a hurry and they were not hurrying. Or I started walking some place and they didn’t come with me when they were supposed to. Or I started walking some place and they all started following me, when I wasn’t really going anywhere. I am learning to make sure I communicate more clearly what the plan is, what’s fixed, what’s flexible, etc. Flexibility in planning seems to really distress them, but I feel like that is part of living in Namibia, so maybe I just need to make it more clear that its an opportunity to learn about being flexible.
Given all of this, overall the students really are amazing and wonderful. They have asked some really insightful questions of our speakers, written some amazing papers, and generally really impressed me. Overall the group gets along and are a mature wonderful group of people to work with. Class discussions are always great and I’m learning a lot about how to facilitate a discussion without directing it too much, make sure the points I want to come out do come out, and that we stay more or less on topic. I definitely still have a lot to learn on this, but I’m learning.
For the most part, the last two weeks were great, cause it was mostly just me traveling around with the students. I’ll end with a funny story from our recent trip. I’m not quite sure how the students see me and this story gave me some insight. While on one hand, they definitely see me as an authority figure, they also call me by my first name, we went to the dunes together and they saw me doing somersaults down the dunes, they were reading Cosmo out loud in the kombi and made a comment about how maybe it was offensive to me and I made a possibly inappropriate comment to the effect that it would be difficult to offend me with Cosmo. So its funny cause some times they sort of treat me like another student, but other times they definitely treat me like an authority figure.
So, now the funny story. On the last night of our trip, we were camping at Okaukuejo in Etosha and having a bbq. An American guy apparently noticed this large group of Americans and came over to find out who we were. It turns out that he has been living in Namibia doing environmental conservation work for the past 8 years and runs programs with US university students somewhat similar to ours but with more of an environmental focus. It was really interesting to talk to him, learn more about his programs and conservation work and look for potential ways that our programs could benefit each other. So we talked for quite a while about our programs and during the conversation he mentioned that he and his colleagues would be in the bar later that evening if I wanted to stop by. We also exchanged our contact information. As he was walking away and I returned to my plate of food, I turned around to find a horde of giggling girls asking me if I was going to meet him in the bar that night cause he was "totally hitting on me because he wanted to get my digits and he KEPT telling me that he would be in the bar”. I explained that I was networking not looking for a date. They all laughed and said, “Oh, ‘networking’ is that what they are calling it these days?” They said that him hitting on me was sooo obvious, but that I was completely unreadable. I had no idea my conversation was under such close scrutiny. I know there is a really good analogy here for what I felt like, but I still can’t think of it. They were all sooo eager and excited for me to go to the bar and talk more to this guy it made me feel really weird. I had no idea my love life was of so much interest to them, as I had really avoided ever mentioning much of anything to them about it. Oh, so to end the story, I did swing by the bar later
