Happy birthday to the chronicles _Horny ostriches, scorching desert and angry farmers

happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear chronicles of fl--yyy, happy birthday to you *singing*

Hip hip hooray! My blog is officially one year old and what a year it has been. To see how it all started click here. I owe a great debt of gratitude to my readers, especially those who leave comments (high five), the other readers; you guys are great but those guys who leave comments! Aaye! you guys are super *Leonard chuene voice*. I'd buy each one of you a bottle of bells but this right here is not the ministry of veterans affairs, we don't give away stuff for free, on this blog you have to earn it.

Before I continue with my acceptance speech and thank everyone including my dog, I'm gona stand and thank everyone associated with the chronicles of fly *stands and claps hands 3 times*. Now that all protocol has been observed (I'm all for order and stuff like someone with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder), let's get down to business.

I have been conspicuously absent for a few weeks because I was busy, I got my first job collecting soil samples that were strategically selected to provide a clear picture of the distribution of minerals in the target area. As you can see from the description, it's some really complex work. Although working in the middle of nowhere under the burning sun with the rain ready to shower down on you with all sorts of predatory animals lurking in the background ready to make you their dinner is quite frightening. There is something much more frightening, nothing makes a geologist want to jump in fright like a springbok or a scared Kudu quite like an angry farmer, maybe a nosy environmentalist! But an angry farmer with a loaded hunting rifle with a silencer will make even an environmentalist call for their mommy.

This one very rude German farmer had the audacity to lock us in his farm and then screamed at us like a girl watching a horror movie. He looked at me and my team and said "I'm not allowing anymore government cars in my farm, if your boss wants the samples she can come down here and sample herself", he goes on to say “I was a geologist as the survey and i did that job by myself in two days”, he probably was superman because the job were doing involves an average walking distance of 10 km’s a day (I got a six pack and ronaldinho legs as a result). So against all logic and reasoning a few days later we came back because it turns out that this guy owns three farms! (you clock up 33 km’s just by driving from the door to the corner of one of his farms). He has enough land to start his own National Park, so we went back and he goes "what? you're back! with three cars! All these fucking cars, with all these fucking people".

That was before we even had a chance to say hello to him (my colleague Nduga had his fists clenched, ready to drop that cracker (but common sense prevailed). I understand that its his property, but it sucks to know that people like him own so much of our land and treat us Namibians like second class citizens, it’s sad *president pohamba should stop calling young people bookfacers and deal with that shit!*. But the part that really sucks is that we still have to go back to his last farm to get five or six more samples, all of us have refused to go back unless the boss tell us himself, mostly because when we left he said “Go!, this is the last time, don’t come back here! Ever again!” he said that while we were thanking him and bidding him farewell.

But if you ignore that and the obvious work politics of some people not liking your leadership style (silently branding you a dictator), you enjoy your work especially working in Namibia's largest nature park. where one day you're sampling while you're surrounded by a couple of horny ostriches, the next you're next to a welwistchia mirabilis (most Namibians die without ever seeing one), and then the next you're so close to a springbok that it smells like biltong. Yep! I get to see so many animals and see so many landscapes that I feel like a tourist. The most frightening encounter so far was with a snake in the Swakop River, I am one of those geologists who make a lot of noise when I walk because I wear size 10 field boots, so the snake was evading me while I was evading it. It was a long brown reptile *that’s all I remember seeing because I was scared shitless!*, soon as I saw it I paid my respects by walking in the opposite direction (cowards live longer). After that we stumbled upon some suspicious looking stuff that looked like a fake tree pretending to be a mountain, it turns out that it was the movie set for Mad Max 4. The Director offered me a role where I die after only two minutes, but I refused because that would be a bad representation of people with dreadlocks *in movies people with dreads are either smoking marijuana, selling it or are witchdoctors*.

I'm lucky that my career allows me to see places that old Europeans pay to see. I was even stuck in the desert 11 km from Walvis bay last Saturday and I would have slept in the middle of the desert had the other boss not arranged for a tow truck to pull us out *we have two bosses, it’s all this BEE nonsense*. The most important thing I’ve learned over the last three weeks is that in the workplace, you will be a leader and a follower. The level of success you gain will depend on knowing when to be a leader and when to be a follower, let’s take a wife as an example, she’s the leader of the household’s activities but in the end she’s a follower because the husband wears the jeans *can’t say pants, coz women wear pants these days as well*. It’s critical to realize that in certain situations you are a leader and critical decisions rest on your shoulders, requiring you to show authority or risk being undermined. On the other hand in other situations you are a follower, you follow the leader because if you don’t, you undermine his/her authority and that leads to trouble, take my advice; avoid trouble at all costs! (nothing positive is ever derived from trouble).