Day 22: Getrud

Picture: Getrud and Denzel

The first time Getrud saw my iPhone, she frowned and said, “Oh, it’s too big.” Then she realized it had Facebook on it and decided it was okay. So I played her some music… First Miriam Makeba, to impress her. She knew the songs and sang along. Then, Marvin Gaye and Nina Simone, whom she’d never heard of. “You don’t listen to music,” she said after a while. “You listen to stories. I think it’s quite nice.” She asked how to dance to music like this, and we danced for a moment in the office.

Getrud is 22-years-old and a mother of two, including my student Denzel. She was just 13 when her mother died, and she had to move to Windhoek to be raised by her sisters. A few years later, at 17, she started dating Christian and was soon pregnant. They moved in together (the Damara rarely marry), and eventually she started working on the farm as a substitute cleaning woman. She was promoted to the office and now manages the formal dinner seven nights a week, with no day off.

She told me she doesn’t have any close friends here... maybe because she’s different from the others. She looks guests in the eye, smiles, laughs... You could pluck her off the farm and drop her into a New York City job interview and I think she just might get it. And she’d do a good job, too, as long as she didn’t have to use a computer... She’s the type of person who doesn’t bring her cell phone to work because she doesn’t want to be distracted, who looks forward to folding new napkin designs every night, and who won’t give anything to the guests that has fallen onto the floor, even though they would never know. In other words, she’s wonderful.

Here’s a video I took of Getrud showing me how to say “Let’s go to the dance” in Damara. This sentence is special because it includes all four of their click sounds.