Hey everyone,

Wow it has been a long time since I last wrote. For all of you fervently checking every hour, the wait is now over. These past few weeks have extremely busy, with classes and a week long homestay here in the city. The more I am in the city, the more I love it. It is really manageable and has a lot of character. All of the facets are well integrated, from corporations to malls to government buildings to small shops. I'm not sure if I had previously mentioned this, but the Supreme Court is about a 15 minute walk from our house, so I look forward to going to see oral arguments in the coming weeks.

My classes have been very interesting, and are already heading into their fourth week. I'm taking Political Institutions of Namibia, Racism and Resistance in Southern Africa, Religion and Social Change, and The Development Process. As a part of the classes, there are many guest speakers that both come to our house and require us to travel to different locales around the city. Some of the speakers that we have had are a minister for a local church, a member of the Namibian government within the office of Developmental Planning, a leading figure in the labor rights movement, and the man who named Namibia and was one of the constitution's authors. All have been very interesting and obviously have provided a multitude of different perspectives, in both ideology and the bias of the position that they come from within society.

In addition to the academic workload, I and two other kids on the program began volunteering at an orphanage. The organization originally formed for kids who had been orphaned due to HIV/AIDS. However, they later changed that philosophy and start allowing any children who qualified to live there, as they deemed it arbitrary to only helped parentless children because of a certain cause of death to the parents. Working with the children has been very rewarding, especially seeing their outlook. I honestly have never been around happier children, and that is not hyperbole to counteract the stereotype that they are afflicted and have reason to be resentful and depressed. they are genuinely very happy children who embrace the community environment that they have grown up in. Watching the older kids look out for the younger ones and the babies is really special.

One of the things that we do at the orphanage is tutor 10th graders with their upcoming exams. While sophomore year of high is pretty nondescript in the U.S.,  it is the penultimate grade within the Namibian education system. In order to continue to 11th grade, you must pass a series of very comprehensive tests on about 10 different subjects, ranging from physics to accounting to math to English to history to physical science, and others. Seeing how these students need to prepare, as well as the lack of resources and quality preparation that they have to endure is disheartening. The pass rate of the exams hovers around 50% nationwide. One of the students that I tutor said that he studied very hard (which I fully believe given his motivation with me) but failed the first time, because he was not instructed what specifically would be on the exams. The students were told to just study the textbook, with no emphasis on what would be considered important. There are some resources that the schools provide, such as past year's exams, but students must buy them at rather high rates, especially considering all of the other expenses that go along with school. The way that the current system is set up, hard work doesn't always pay off. Not even close.

The education system, from my limited observations, seems to be really broken. While the constitution guarantees public education for all citizens, that does not mean that there is free education for all students (which seems counterintuitive). Rather, school fees must be paid to attend a school. Some schools charge much higher school fees than others, which predictably leads to better education. Right off the bat, there is an inherent inequality, as poorer students will be effectively forced into the poorer, and lower-achieving, schools. On top of the school fees, students must pay for all of their textbooks, all of their school supplies, and their uniform. For a poor family, the cost of education is exorbitant. For a family with no income (and Namibia has a 52% unemployment rate, so there are many such families), the cost of schooling is prohibitive to their children receiving any education at all. Even with studies done by the UN stating that for every dollar that the government puts into education, the economy will get back 10-fold (), the government does not put a priority on quality education for everyone. They claim to do so, but the costs prevent such claim from actually being truthful.

Next week, we are headed to our rural homestays for about a week, which admittedly is slightly disconcerting, considering some families don't speak any English. For that time we won't have classes and we will be with our homestay family the entire time. Afterward, we will go to the coast for a three day seminar then a couple of days at the beach. Then, the following week is fall break, where we have planned to go to Victoria Falls and a canoe trip through Botswana. And for all of you wondering (maybe there aren't any of you), I'm fully up to date on the Jets. The NFL international package is great. You can watch games whenever you want and the homepage doesn't reveal the scores if you want to watch after the fact, which I will have to do once we go to the coast.

Talk to everyone soon,

Evan