"When we arrived here, I was surprised again because it was the first time I had seen dry land. For the first time. Because Angola had been very green, Zambia had been green, Czech Republic had been green. Suddenly I was flying here, I saw trees here, trees there, drought like nothing else. So here I know that there was something not pleasant for my soul probably as I had known it. So that's one thing, like, you know, you feel like you're... It somehow didn´t fit me. I'd say it more like that. That was the first thing." - "Because it was your first time in Namibia, wasn't it?" - "Yeah, it was the first time." - "Because if you'd be returning to your homeland..." - "And don't forget that I expected us to be, that it was going to be a jungle like in fairy tales, like Tarzan. And then this, I felt pretty betrayed." - "You mention it a little bit, but try to describe more how you felt. You mentioned a moment ago the culture shock that you had experienced. What was it about?" - "The culture shock, that's more about when I came into contact with people. It's not like... like what I told you, the first time I've seen like physically the land. Like where we came from. But the culture shock is more about relationships with people. There was the... the rules of how things were done, how things were said, what was considered to be right - or wrong - to say. Like, because from the Czech Republic, you could say, we were very free to express ourselves. I don't remember, for example, you would say something to the teachers and they would say something like, 'Well, you don't talk to adults like that' or things like that. I don't remember that. So it's not that we weren't taught manners, like how to talk to adults or that, but here it became terribly strict. There's an importance placed on everything. Yeah, you must do this here in front of an adult, you must bow like this, you must, you must, you must, you must. I just suddenly wasn't used to this. So it didn´t fit me somehow."
"When I met my mother as well, of course, by feeling the relationship between the child and the adult, at home the relationship was a little bit different. It wasn't... it wasn't the same. It didn't fit with me. So it came out that I was kind of a rebel. Well, I guess you could say that we kind of... Well, she didn't have an easy time with me. That's how I would put it. She didn't have an easy time with me. Because of various things. From the food - they just gave something and I ate, like, oshifima for the first time, which I absolutely love today, but I understand, I guess the technology at the time wasn't like that. I could just feel things in it, like little stones and stuff. Well, it's not only about the food, it's really a lot of things. Just manners, as you say, completely different."
"We lived in Bartošovice. Yeah. We lived in Bartošovice." - "And how would you describe it, Bartošovice?" - "Like a really fabulously beautiful village. Like, for me it was just a different world all at once. But different in a nice way. Suddenly... I had some sort of order suddenly though, that's where I felt the difference. Suddenly there was some order and control - right, left - you know what I mean. I could feel those things here, but again they were... Although here, nobody likes it when somebody's managing you. So I have a problem with that myself, I admit. But the feel of it, the way it was delivered, was interesting. So I guess that's why it was easy to submit to it."
Eveline Vekhambura Živec was born on 23 December 1979 in the then capital of Tanzania, Dar es Salaam. She spent her early childhood in exile camps for Namibian independence fighters in Zambia and Angola. She was growing up among many other children, without parents who served in the army. In 1985 she flew to Czechoslovakia with 55 other children. This was an international aid operation for the Marxist SWAPO movement, which was then fighting for Namibia’s independence from South Africa. The aim was to raise the children to be Namibia’s elite. The children were placed in Bartošovice in the Nový Jičín region, and in 1988 the group was moved to the grounds of the former spa in Prachatice. In 1991, Vekhambura, together with her group and a group of other Namibian children from Považská Bystrica, was repatriated to Namibia, where she eventually lived with her mother. She had not seen her for many years and in fact did not know her, so it was not easy to re-establish a relationship. After completing her secondary school diploma in Namibia, she took advantage of a scholarship for repatriated Namibian children and returned to the Czech Republic to study. She studied social and cultural anthropology at University of West Bohemia (ZČU) in Pilsen and international relations at Palacký University (UP) in Olomouc. She lived for several years in Prague, where she married her husband Jiří Živec. Since 2016 they have been living in Namibia, on a farm near the capital Windhoek. They have three children together and Eveline Vekhambura Živec works as a police officer.
