Concrete

Namibia has a distinctive building style. Nearly all the buildings are made of concrete blocks, often with a layer of cement on the outside and tile on the inside. Much of the construction we’ve witnessed makes it clear that there’s no fear of earthquakes: the blocks are not built up around rebar, but occasionally have a bit of wire mesh, sort of like a strip of fencing, placed horizontally between successive layers. When the lab building was constructed in April adjacent to the existing hatchery at the Salt Company, the new walls were attached by nailing a strip of aluminum to the old wall, then bending it to lie in the new mortar.
Even some of the streets are constructed of interlocking concrete pavers.
Picnic tables at national park campgrounds are also made of concrete. So it was that, when I rushed to finish up some formatting on the next curriculum submission, in order to join the rest of the family on a late afternoon game drive, I encountered an immovable object – a concrete seat, conveniently placed next to the concrete table, but hidden behind the laptop I was carrying and so invisible to me. I tripped, I had no hands to catch myself, as I was carrying the laptop, my face hit the acacia tree providing some shade for the picnic site, my knee was cut deeply by the concrete seat edge, and my opposite elbow took the brunt of the impact on the ground. The computer went flying.
Of course, I yelled in agony, primarily from fear that the computer – and all of the curriculum revisions, due the next day – was irreparably damaged. Fortunately, Alan was able to fix the damages to both person and computer; they turned out to be strictly cosmetic. But I got some good sympathy points initially for the blood-soaked dressings on knee and elbow, and I’ve been walking a bit stiff-legged for a week. The curriculum submission went in, not without more than a few hiccups – this is the final submission, which occurs at the university-wide level (a month ago, it was just at the school-level), and it was a 2-hour process from an internet café in Outjo. Fortunately the café part had great pastries….