Unposed Namibia
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Unposed Namibia
A month in rural Namibia to explore what we've left behind, and what was never worth chasing.
Titus and Fiona
The first week, we stayed with Titus and Fiona. We pitched our tents in their yard and built a stone wall around the elephants’ drinking trough.
There’s no running water. The toilet is a pit latrine out back; the doors inside are just pieces of cloth; the windows are holes in the walls that don’t open or close. Each day, wood is chopped to keep the cooking fire alive, and a single yes to hosting a weather antenna in the yard brought the unexpected bonus of free solar panels for electricity.
Life revolves around goats: milked, eaten, sold. Beyond that, there are chickens, a handful of hens, and a vegetable garden.
Titus and Fiona, both 58, live alone but not apart. They share pastures, decisions, and daily life with a community of thirteen families. Their grown children have moved away, but when school is out, the grandchildren come and never want to leave their grandparents’ house in the countryside.
It’s a stripped-down life: no frills, no travel, no cars, no shelves crowded with things, no dinners out. And yet it doesn’t feel empty, or less alive, or less serene. If anything, even from the little I saw, I might almost say: quite the opposite.
I might almost see, in it, everything we’ve managed to lose.
Envy
Envy is ugly—ugly in the way perfect things are: distant, cold, unreal, deceptive. Sloppy the way all shortcuts are sloppy.
Envy has the selective taste of a burglar.
It rummages through other people’s lives and grabs only what glitters: the job, the vacation, the love declarations on Instagram. It doesn’t see the stress, the loneliness, the trade-offs.
Envy makes us ugly. It stiffens our posture, flattens our voice, warps our smiles, dulls our gaze.
So I try not to feel it when I look at them.
When I think about all they don’t have, and don’t need. When I see curious, sharp, well-mannered children. When I notice the grace and strength in their bodies. When they’re laughing over a pile of rocks or chatting with people of any age.
I try not to feel it when I witness the closeness of a small community, how every interaction involves touch, how they sit still, looking into the void, just waiting.
I try to believe there’s more I haven’t seen, and that nothing we have is worth their envy.
