The Heat

Picture 1: Grade 10 kids: l to r Veronika, Ankosi, Klementine and Moses.
Picture 2: Grade 8 girls...bottom right, Katewa Kalina, is a favorite.
Picture 3: Front page of the newspaper I started with grade 9 learners.

These days, the wind is no more relieving than a space heater on full-blast. The breeze acts to destroy the relative cool of my house, ushering 120⁰ air into my 100⁰ bedroom. By 9am, one must actively separate all body parts from other body parts to avoid the sweat that such contact creates. This is especially true when sedentary. Don’t cross your legs. Give up touching your face. In fact, take care to keep the inside of your upper arms from spending too much time touching the sides of your torso. The armpit slick that endures the day will only thicken and, occasionally, drip.

So here I am, spread eagle on my bed to avoid excess sweat, my feet repelling each other like the positive poles of two magnets. I’ve started a newspaper/newsletter/magazine (haven’t decided) club with grade 9 for which kids can write on any topic they wish. In three hours, I’ll receive the final drafts of the stragglers’ articles and begin formatting and generating the inside pages. Pictured above is the design for the front-page with those articles I selected as the headliners. It takes me about this amount of time – three hours – to think through anything in any great depth in this great heat.

Napping in the afternoon is impossible. Maybe if it wasn’t, the days would pass more quickly and the coveted cool of nighttime would come sooner. But during these afternoons, after a few hours of comatose sprawling on my increasingly sweat-soaked sheets, is when I work with grade 9 on their articles. Some are straightforward, the most popular being taking a stance on which artist – Gazza or the Dogg – deserves recognition as Namibia’s finest. Others are more poignant, like those I chose for the front page. And still others are incomprehensible and/or illegible.

Finally, by 5:30 when afternoon study ends, the kids leave and sunset is only an hour away. Unfortunately, this is when my room, formerly a refuge, becomes a veritable bread oven, its 2-foot thick walls spitting the heat absorbed in every direction. As the night air cools, my bedroom temperature rises, fueled by the furnace that encases it. And so begins another sleepless night with each extremity seeking solitude on the furthest corner of the bed. Inevitably, I’ll shift to a dry part of the sheets.