It has officially been
one month since I first entered the gates of the Gobabeb Research and Training
Centre and, given the theme of delays this journey began with, here’s my
much-delayed first blogpost about my time in the Namib. After arriving to
Walvis Bay’s tiny tented airport and packed into Gina (one of Gobabeb’s
vehicles) alongside a fridge, I began the
Hectic Handover. Patty and Tayler, my predecessors at Gobabeb, were leaving
on Saturday the 18th for various parts of the world, giving us only
48 hours of overlap during which they could pass on whatever wisdom they had
gained during their time at the Station. Since Chris, my fellow fellow, was still
delayed back in the States with more visa struggles, I was to gather as much
intel as I could for both the TAOS (Training and Outreach, my own position) and
RITS (Research and IT, Chris’) positions.
After meeting a flurry
of faces that first evening, at Tayler and Patty’s farewell dinner and my first
meal at the famed Old House, our Friday was packed chock-full as Patty attempted
to give me enough context on the basics of my forthcoming year for her and
Tayler’s advice to make sense. [Let me just put in a tremendous thank you to both Patty and Tayler for
the intense amounts of work they put into recording their best, most thoughtful
pieces of advice and guidance into their incredibly detailed handover
documents. I can’t speak for Chris, but the variety of documents you left with
both broader context and smaller detail were, and continue to be, of great help
as I adjust to GBB!] Friday was pretty hectic as we jumped from different
projects and through a range of responsibilities I was inheriting, but we
eventually brought our day’s discussions to a close to head up Station Dune for
a last sundowner for Tayler and Patty.
Learning . . . Forty-eight
hours after my arrival, I was on my own – and with a school group already
arriving in a matter of days! My first school group was from Texas A&M
University, visiting Namibia for a month this summer on some cultural studies
and photography courses. This was my first “Teritiary” school group
(university-level students), and since they were pursuing their own courses
while here, it gave me the opportunity to shadow Rita, my lovely co-Trainer at
Gobabeb, in some of the basic activities we offer all school groups: the
Station Tour, the Nature Walk, and the Scorpion Walk. Beyond that, the Texans’
gracious hospitality allowed me to join them on their Topnaar cultural
tour-visit to a neighboring Topnaar village. The Topnaars (Dutch-Afrikaans for “people
who live at the edge”) have lived along the Kuiseb River for centuries, and
continue to be neighbors to GBB today. I joined a fascinating tour illustrating
Topnaar livelihoods and indigenous knowledge of the landscape that Topnaar had
inhabited for hundreds of years, before we visited a modern Topnaar village to
get a taste of the famous !nara cake. The Texans ended their visit to Gobabeb
with a sundowner from atop Station Dune, a rather unforgettable spectacle of
Aggie pride, and what I can only hope will be the first and last “Dune Dive” I
witness while a Trainer here!
. . . and Teaching Soon after the Texans left, I was greeting our
next school group – a group of teenaged boys from a British secondary school,
visiting on the tail-end of a holiday-tour of Namibia. This was my first
opportunity to implement a full schedule of activities for a school group, and
I was interested in testing out some new ones – and so I found myself baking
muffins in a solar oven, sifting through the library for literature on the
Kuiseb River Basin Management authorities, and reading, re-reading guiding
notes for the Nature Walk and Station Tour. Rita was going to be in Windhoek
for a UNAM conference on remote sensing/GIS technology, so I was on my own for
this one – a bit of a plunge, but there’s nothing like hitting the ground
running to get you comfortable in your new job! Aside from some unfortunate
timing (my first sandstorm! … which continued into the bulk of our scheduled
Nature Walk…) and a lot of running around as the single trainer in charge and
on hand, all went pretty handily – the boys had a blast during an afternoon
racing up and around the dunes, releasing our pet Parabuthus villosus scorpion, and trying their hand at species
design for Namib-adapted animals. I found out which activities worked better
than others, and got plenty of ideas for possible projects and improvements to
Training’s school-group offerings.
Learning the alphabet (of acronyms) at GBB Once the rapid-fire school visits were over and
the dust had settled a bit, I got to do some more basic GBB learning myself.
Whenever I had the time to spare, Jess, one of our more experienced research
technicians at the Station, graciously took me along to show me one of the
regular long-term monitoring tasks – including weather, monitoring dune
movement/morphology, borehole water-level monitoring, pit-fall trap surveys,
and NOAA air sampling. These excursions gave me a chance to see beyond the
boundaries of the tour circuits into the research half of GBB, and the time to ask
more and more questions about everything from the Station’s history, to the
nature of Dancing White Lady Spiders, to who Helga dune was named after. Jess
and all the station staff have been wonderfully patient with my many queries,
and have done a lot to help me feel welcome in the research wing of Gobabeb –
for which I’ve been very grateful, because the research that Gobabeb does is
endlessly fascinating! As clichéd and geeky as it may sound, there’s just so
much to learn about this unique place where three ecosystems meet and a
surprising medley of species make their home.
My day-to-day now often
included a lot of reading and asking questions about that unique mix of species
around Gobabeb, as I attempted to familiarize myself with both the programs in
Training and the landscapes around me in the quieter weeks to come. There are a
phenomenal wealth of acronyms that live at Gobabeb – you’ve already noticed my
shorthand for Gobabeb (GBB) in frequent use here – including but not limited
to: GTRIP, SDP, BSRN, MPI, ODP, FLC, SSP, JDP, DRFN … The list goes on, and
much of my first few weeks at the Station has been spent getting accustomed to
and educated in what each of these acronyms means. Before we venture into
defining any of those acronyms, let me give you my job in a nutshell, as
defined through a combination of the actual job description and my own month’s-worth
of experience in it: the TAOS
Grinnellcorps fellow (colloquially referred to as “Grinnells” around here) is
tasked with “supporting capacity building, science education, and environmental
education” at Gobabeb, primarily by implementing the established environmental
research internships and educational programming offered by the Station. This support
comes in a wide range of forms, and if there is one thing to be taken from the
annually-revised job description I received, it is the essential need for flexibility on the part of the
Grinnells. This was re-emphasized upon my arrival to the Station by Tayler and
Patty, and appears to be the singular feature of the job here that doesn’t
change over time. Designing and implementing the environmental education
programming for school groups is one of the key day-to-day responsibilities of
my position, but is only one of the range of activities I will likely find
myself involved in this year. I also assist with the implementation of several
other long-running programs that occur throughout the year, including two
different types of internship programs, and special projects, like a number of community
outreach grants Gobabeb is working on developing on the ground this coming
year.
With so many different
projects developing, school groups visiting, and researchers researching at
Gobabeb, it’s taken me very little time here to realize how suiting Gobabeb’s
distinction as an “oasis of learning” is.
