On the Horizon

This post serves not so much as an update as a prelude to an update, or a sneak preview of an update, if you will. For starters, I may as well concede to the inevitability that this blog cannot remain 100% about Namibia-related matters (or rather, if it did, it would probably for much of the near future maintain the current rate of content updates: approximately one per blue moon). Instead, let this serve as the transition to a more “general purpose” blog, wherein I will occasionally take the time to discuss whatever boring stuff is on my mind.

Be excited.

For the moment, the good news is that I actually want to talk about something Namibia-related anyway. And that is: our mission to bring Paulina and Meameno to the States. (For those of you who don’t recognize those names, you can go back to one of my older posts — I think it’s called “Who Are These Little People?” or something like that — for a brief description of each girl.)

There’s a lot of news, some exciting and some frustrating. I won’t go in depth on either, but I want to at least provide some basic info. To start with the exciting: the visa application process is nearing completion, and it’s looking like both girls MAY be able to receive visas. This is obviously very exciting. The frustrating news is actually the flip side of this coin, and stems from the reason I say “MAY” instead of “WILL.” Paulina’s mother is proving to be very difficult to rely on. While she has pulled through in some pleasantly surprising ways (obtaining Paulina’s full birth certificate as well as written consent from her father, who lives hundreds of kilometers away in Windhoek), she has proven stubbornly unhelpful in others. Chief among these is her reluctance to make the actual physical trip to Windhoek — the last step in this whole process, the one thing left to be done before Paulina can be issued a visa — on financial grounds.

I should point out a couple of things: first, the only expense Paulina’s mom would incur by traveling to Windhoek is the cost of the transport itself, which would total about US $30 round trip. Granted, this is a significant amount of money for many Namibians; BUT, here’s the thing: Kathryn and I have already promised to reimburse her for the travel cost. The only problem is that we can’t simply make cash materialize in her pocket; it takes some time to wire money overseas and arrange for a person to deliver it to her. It almost seems that she is choosing not to help us until she can feel the money in her hands, which is problematic because this needs to get done as soon as possible since we need time to fund-raise and make plans for what we can do together with the girls when they arrive.

The other point, which hardly even seems worth mentioning, is that Kathryn and I have already made a pretty substantial financial investment in this process ourselves. Though I would not in a million years expect Paulina’s mom to spend a lot of money on this herself (that would be completely unrealistic), I do find it somewhat disconcerting that she would treat a matter that we have put so much into as such a low priority. I think I’m coming across as somehow self-important in this paragraph, which is obviously not how I feel; maybe I’m being too unsympathetic, but I think more likely is that it’s difficult to convey in writing the aloofness, the self-centeredness, and the general lack of concern for her daughter that this woman has.

But I do feel bad saying that because, like I said, she has been helpful in some ways. It may simply be that, like many parents, she feels for her child at certain points more strongly than at other times. If this is the case, and if the amount of time and effort she’s willing to spend for her daughter’s sake were a sine wave, right now it seems to have come down from a peak and be going through a bit of a valley.

In other news, my plan is to begin work full-force on that school administration software starting at the end of May, when Kathryn leaves for Malaysia and I’ll be home all alone with not much better to do for almost a full month. I’m actually thinking the timing is perfect, because now that I work full-time as a software developer, I’ve gained so much knowledge and experience in just the last couple of months that I’m far more confident now than I was in my previous post of my ability to design and build something solid and usable for my old colleagues back in Namibia. But time will tell if that confidence is well founded.

Also, to come back to the topic of Meameno and Paulina briefly, we’re planning on creating a website in the near future to describe the girls, explain our plans, provide an avenue for people to contribute, etc. One problem we’ve run into is thinking up a good name; does anyone have any good suggestions? And by “good suggestions” I really mean “suggestions of any kind?” One possibility we’re toying with is “Namibian Dreams,” i.e., something like www.namibiandreams.org. But maybe that’s too corny. In any case, all ideas are welcome.

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