OUR FIRST HOME IN WINDHOEK

Our first home in Windhoek was a few blocks away, at the other end of the one paved street. It was a larger hotel and it did have a room. There was no check in desk but the manager, with the hotel register, was at his usual position tending the bar off to one side. All hotels in Namibia were like this one in that they were registered as a hotel primarily because a liquor license was always given to hotels, no matter how few rooms they might have. This one was not really so bad, however. They gave us a comfortable room near the communal bath. And a door in the passage just by our room opened onto the beer garden. It was really only used in the evenings, so the paved area with trees and flowers was great for Kathy and ourselves to use when the walls seemed to be closing in on us. There was also a small zoo and park, near the post office, which was only a short walk up the street. Being the city center, that street was lined by a good selection of small stores and shops.

Since the streets were not all named and numbered anywhere other than right in the center of town, we needed to apply for a post office box, and start looking for a proper house as soon as possible. The house search became a matter for urgent prayer and searching. There was an English Newspaper, with mostly Upington news, and it contained small’s adverts. From those, we learned that houses were extremely scarce. Driving around to get the layout of the town in mind, we noted no empty houses anywhere. After a few weeks we were moved across the street to an overflow area of the hotel, where we had a larger room and no bar across the garden, but at the same time we were told that all their rooms were rented a year in advance for the holiday season that was coming up very shortly. We had to be out by then.

We knew we would be happy to leave if we could, because we were not happy with the menu available. All the desserts were laced with wine or brandy, blood sausages featured heavily on the menu and they expected us to order from the bar with our meals. The coffee was so strong we could not drink it. In other words, we were probably as big a problem to them as they were to us.

In our exploring the town, we had driven across the valley to the black community so we were praying for something near there. That was exactly what the Lord provided. One day the paper listed a shop with a house attached. It was a renovation in progress but suited our needs perfectly. The "in progress" stopped promptly we signed the lease of course. The lease was high, well "exorbitant" might be a better word, but it was available exactly when we needed it and it was on the last street with only a dry stream bed that separated us from the black township. That one block long street was lined with trading stores offering very basic foods. Our house was on the corner, with a new porch added on the street side, and a small shop added with that. We had a chapel, a porch, and a study/store room in that half of the building. A separate entrance on the side led to a tiny living room, a small kitchen, and the bath with a cold-water shower over the tub, and a basin. Off the living room were two bedrooms. All the floors were rough concrete, and there was no floor at all outside the entrance to this part of the building at all. Our door had no less than four locks or bolts. A stroll led to the toilet, which contained a bucket that was collected by the municipality occasionally, emptied into the “honey wagon“ and a disinfected bucket replacement installed sometime during the night. The upper yard was littered with builder‘s rubble. and the lower one sloped to the dry stream bed. We would not have believed it could happen, had we not seen a car being swept away in that stream during a torrential rainfall one day. This was to be home for us, the scorpions, and a small snake for the next two years.