Yesterday, I was on a Sprinter mini-bus heading to Manzini when a man in his mid-30s got on and sat down next to me. He laughed at my SiSwati name, asked me if I had a boyfriend, and then asked me if he could put his jackhammer between my legs. I rolled my eyes and looked away, staring blankly out the window, preoccupied with hateful thoughts about inappropriate Swazi men.
"Sisi! Sisi!" He kept trying to get my attention. I finally gave in and glared back in his general direction. There, standing in the aisle between the seats, was the conductor (the person who takes the money), trying to find a place to store a jackhammer for the rest of the ride. And then I felt like a jerk.
But seriously, how was I supposed to know the man had an actual jackhammer? And how was my singleness in any way relevant to the storage of his jackhammer? What would YOU have assumed? I guess if there's a moral to this story, it's that I shouldn't assume that every random word a Swazi man says to me is a euphemism for a sex organ/act. (Though most of the time, my assumption WOULD be correct.)
On a somewhat related note, the Prime Minister of Swaziland, Mr. Sibusiso Barnabas Dlamini, recently called for all Members of Parliament (MPs) to be circumcised. Circumcision has been shown to decrease a man's susceptibility to HIV infection (the foreskin is naturally porous and is a great entry point for the virus into the body, so removing it makes it more difficult for the virus to enter the body), and he said that MPs should lead by example and encourage Swazi men to circumcise. The Swazi Times, the biggest newspaper in the country, interviewed 6 MPs about the issue, asking them if they were circumcised and if they supported the idea. My favorite response is from MP Peter Ngwenya-Ntontozi:
"Ngwenya said he did not know if he was circumcised or not. 'I am not too supportive of the idea because what if in future things go wrong and then there are calls for the stopping of circumcision? Where would I then get my foreskin from?'"
'Nuff said.
Friday, June 25, 2010
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
This is my life.
There have been countless times in the last two years when, overwhelmed or disappointed by Swaziland, I’ve taken a critical look at my life and asked myself “What the hell am I doing here?” Sometimes, when I can’t feel my toes as I’m trying to fall asleep, I kick myself for giving up my cozy little temperature-controlled apartment in DC. When I’m making popcorn for dinner for the fifth consecutive night, I obsess about seafood chimichangas and lime-raspberry swirl margaritas from Guapo’s that I could be eating if only I had chosen a different course in life. But just when I’m beginning to get discouraged, or when I’m starting to wish that I hadn’t come here in the first place, some seemingly insignificant event brings me back to reality and reminds me that I couldn’t be happier anywhere else.
This week, after a particularly terrible class at Jericho High School and nearly 3 hours sitting on a dusty road waiting for public transport, it was Bob Marley that brought me back. As I hurled my 30-pound backpack into the front seat of the long-awaited kombi, disappointed with my apathetic class, frustrated with the cold and windy weather, and angry at the high-decibel sermon blaring from the kombi’s speakers, I planned to wallow in self-pity for the duration of the trip home. Until, perhaps sensing my foul mood, the kombi driver put in a Bob Marley CD and cranked up the volume. Almost instantly, the driver and the kombi’s 10 other passengers started belting out the lyrics to “Is This Love” and “I Shot the Sheriff” and, suddenly, I remembered why I was in Swaziland: because nowhere else in the world would I find myself traveling down a winding dirt road in a mini-bus full of singing strangers…and call it “work.”
All in all it’s been a pretty good week, and I have high hopes for the foreseeable future. I’m making progress on my bus shelter billboard painting campaign and presenting my progress thus far to Peace Corps at a meeting on Thursday. I’m meeting this week with the borehole company that will hopefully be doing the water project in my community, and the clinic should know by the end of the week when we’ll get started on the garden part of the project. I’m representing the Bambanani project at a big event about recycling and attending a workshop about marketing Swazi handicrafts overseas. Plus I’m getting a long overdue haircut, which always makes for a good week. Amazing.
And now, for a change of format, here’s my week in photos:
I’ve become pretty well-acquainted with the bus rank in Nhlangano. Seriously, I spend a couple of hours there every week and, being the only white girl who frequents the place, I’ve gotten to know most of the pushy bus conductors, the men who offer to carry heavy bags for a couple of coins, the woman with the pronounced limp who sells oversized rolls of toilet paper and suspicious little bags of traditional herbs, the obnoxious kombi drivers who fight with each other and flirt shamelessly with me. I’ve even gotten to know the “schedules” of the kombis I take most frequently. Nothing is exact, but I’ve noticed that the kombi to Jericho High School usually fills between 8:15 and 8:30 in the morning, and that the kombi to Hluti hardly ever leaves between 11:15 and 2:00. And it only took me 2 years of sitting around in the bus rank to figure it out! Success, I say.
I think I’ve mentioned before the ridiculous importance that Swazi public schools place on sports. I know I’ve complained about my classes being cancelled for “sports day,” when schools are closed so that 15 soccer players from each school can meet in town for a day-long tournament without having make-up work to do. I’ve even attended the sports days to watch my students put 1000% more effort into their netball games than their English homework, but this is just too much. It’s the official crest of Jericho High School, which reads “Knowledge is power. Sport is life.” Really? I was pretty sure that sport was just a hobby for those of us not gifted enough to make a profession of it. For LeBron James, yes, sport is life. But for the rest of us, sport is less important than knowledge. (It’s supposed to be, at least.)
I’m continually impressed with the ingenuity of Swazi women, and my host family’s make (mother) Sibongile is no exception. Here, she’s weaving a grass mat using a homemade loom of sorts that’s made from a tree trunk with notches cut in it, white plastic fibers unwoven from a feed sack, and a bunch of C-sized batteries that she’s collected over the years. She wraps the fibers from the feed sacks around the batteries, which are attached to the loom, and then wraps the batteries around the pieces of grass to connect each piece of grass to the one before it. I sat and watched her do this for 20 minutes and still couldn’t figure out exactly how it worked, but she’s quite the grass mat-making professional and makes quite a business of selling them in the community, since these kinds of grass mats are what most people in the community (my host family included) sleep on. This particular one in the photo she was making for her niece Lindiwe who came to stay with us for most of the week.
On Tuesday, while sitting in the kombi at the Nhlangano bus rank, I realized that I didn’t have a photo of PSI’s “A Man Knows” logo and slogan, which I planned to paint on a billboard the following day. I guess I could’ve gone back to the internet cafe and printed one out, but instead I found one of my kombi conductor friends and asked him to find me one that I could photograph. PSI (an American NGO that does HIV-related work in Swaziland) started this campaign to get men to test for HIV that basically says that a REAL man knows his HIV status, and they’d been putting stickers with the logo and whatnot on kombis in Manzini and Mbabane. So all I had to do was find one of the stickers. Feeling lazy, I sent my friend off to find me a kombi with a sticker on it, which he did. But even after I’d gotten my photos, other kombi drivers kept coming up and wanting me to take photos of THEIR stickers, which they were obviously very proud of. It started an interesting conversation, among the kombi drivers and myself, about the campaign and the importance of testing and who had been tested and who hadn’t yet and what sorts of behaviors put men at risk for HIV. It’s so funny to see what sorts of educational endeavors actually STICK in Swaziland and which ones are completely ignored, and I was impressed with the effectiveness of this particular campaign. Kudos, PSI!
So on Wednesday, after finding my “thumbs up” logo in the bus rank, I set out to Hluti with fellow PCVs Darryn, Brandon, and Laura, to beautify the bus shelters with messages about the importance of HIV testing. We used the “A Man Knows” logo and whatnot from PSI, and also another of PSI’s campaigns about the importance of couples testing for HIV together. It was a fantasticly productive morning/afternoon, and I am VERY impressed with the outcome. I still have a few finishing touches to put on this week (like the hours that the clinic offers free testing), but I think we did a great job. We certainly attracted a lot of attention! In this photo is the “thumbs up” logo expertly drawn by Darryn and Brandon using the grid method that makes drawing possible for the artistically challenged.
The full sign reads “A Man Knows he is not a man until he tests.” There’s a bright yellow box on the far left where I’ll write “FREE TESTING” and then have the hours for free HIV testing at both Hluti Clinic and OLOS Clinic, but I need to confirm those things with the clinic staff before I make them public and somewhat permanent.
Our second billboard, which Laura and I primarily worked on, has a picture of a man and woman on it, then says “Tell her something that no one has told her before: Baby, let’s have that test!” (Beautiful lettering done by me! I'm getting pretty good at block letters, if I may say so myself.) It’s part of a campaign funded by Lusweti, PSI, USAID, the Swaziland Ministry of Health, and several other organizations, and I like the message. Although I’m still not convinced that there’s anything particularly romantic about having an HIV test…
Laura concentrating on her man’s hands. In the poster (which I actually posted a photo of about a year ago…it was my inspiration for the whole bus stop painting project), the man’s arms go up into a big heart shape around the woman’s face, and I think she captured the image perfectly. She says it’s her masterpiece and that she’s retiring from art.
While Laura was busy having actual artistic ability, I drew and painted this part of the billboard. It says “It’s not just an HIV test, it’s a love test.” Which I think is pretty catchy. We weren’t sure if the black parts on the top and upper right were supposed to be JUST a broken arrow or if they were also supposed to represent, in an abstract and somewhat implied way, the symbols for male and female. If so, brilliant. The part in the middle, where it says “The Love Test,” is supposed to be filled in with red, but I ran out of red paint and then decided that I like it this way anyway. (And, yes, the letters are supposed to be all irregular and uneven and whatnot, I'm not an idiot.)
My friend Shaun came down from Mbabane to help us put the finishing touches on the billboard, and then spent the evening hanging out with my host family and watching the Bafana Bafana versus Uruguay game. (Bafana Bafana is South Africa’s team.) Bafana Bafana, sadly, lost 3-0, but it was still fun to watch the game with the family. Plus he got to experience the madness that is my house full of children every night.
I’ve been trying to turn the World Cup fever (seriously, it’s everywhere) into a geography lesson for the kids on my homestead. And since the lesson involves trashing my floor with paint and gigantic pieces of paper left over from when I was teaching last year, they don’t even realize they’re learning! Here, my sisi (sister) Londiwe is painting the American flag. Obviously.
Kwanele likes to draw the South African flag. Most Swazi kids do, actually. It’s kind of sad. If you give a Swazi kid a piece of paper and crayons, he’ll either draw a soccer player, a WWE wrestler (John Cena or Batista), or the South African flag. It’s a skewed kind of patriotism, I think. And what does that say about their identity as Swazis? Wouldn’t you think it was weird if every time you gave an American kid a piece of paper they drew the Canadian flag? Hm.
This evil chicken bit me at precisely the moment this photo was taken. I was out at Pasture Valley visiting the kids and inspecting their new temporary chicken coop (which Uncle Chris, another PCV, is renovating and relocating) when this jerk decided that my left index finger was food. I was like 8 inches away from her cage! Apparently, she has a seriously long neck when she wants to. And then all of the kids laughed at me while I complained about my booboo.
Me and Buhle from Pasture Valley Children’s Home. The kids at PV had a fun time messing up my hair, which they always do. But this time it was so bad that I actually had to cut a little of my hair to get my hair tie out. It’s just hair; it’ll grow back, I say.
Auntie Jenny, another PCV, teaching the Grade 1 students to read and write. I’m sure they learn SOMETHING at school (actually, from what I’ve seen of Swazi schools I’m not entirely certain of that), but then they come home for an hour of after school tutoring in the preschool. They’re using the site reading cards that my parents sent me in a care package to practice sounding out words, then writing them in the handwriting books I ALSO got in a care package. Meanwhile, I’m just sitting in the back of the classroom taking pictures. (Later I did help with the writing portion of the lesson so I’m not completely useless.)
Finally, after what seems like forever, the JA Company at Jericho High School is producing! We spent several weeks making paper beads, then spent a week varnishing them, and then we spent this last week stringing them into necklaces. Theoretically, they’ll be selling them this week so that we can make more next week (and so I can get paid back the several hundred rand I’ve spend on buying them supplies to make their product), or whenever the students decide to show up again. My frustration with the program isn’t so much the students in these photos, it’s the drunk ones standing outside the classroom saying sexually inappropriate things to me through the broken windows and the ones who didn’t bother to show up to class that day. I have a pretty solid attendance of 12 for a class where 32 students are registered. I guess I shouldn’t be offended, though…that’s about the average attendance of my classes as UKZN (where I studied abroad in South Africa), so I don’t blame myself.
In our first actual production session, we produced 32 necklaces. Our plan was to make 80, but with so many kids absent 80 was a pretty unrealistic goal. Despite my frustrations, it was a proud moment for the group to finally see what they’ve been working on for weeks coming together. Hopefully now the product doesn’t get stolen (like many of the raw materials have…scissors, magazines, glue, more scissors, etc.) before they have a chance to sell it. But if it does, I guess I’ll just turn it into a lesson about good business practices in Swaziland?
After 2 years of staring longingly at it, I FINALLY conquered the mountain (really a big hill) behind my house! Several times in the past year I’ve set off to walk up to the top, but I’m always turned away by Mkhulu (grandpa) who tells stories of the 4-meter-long black mambas and the deadly puff adders that live in the rocks on the mountain or my bhuti (brother) Kwanele who emphasizes the importance of carrying a snake-whacking stick. But this time, Mkhulu was at church and everybody else was busy plowing the garden, so Eliza and I set out on an adventure. She’s been up the mountain hundreds of times because she goes up most evenings to round up the family’s cattle, so she was kind of like my guide. And we did find ONE snake, a brownish-looking thing that ran away as soon as Eliza barked at it and jumped in its general direction. I choose to believe that it was non-venomous.
As usual, I tried to make Eliza sit still for some photos. And failed. But look at that tongue!
And, 40 attempts later, a nice portrait of a girl and her dog. Awwww...
From the top of the mountain, you can see EVERYTHING in my community. It’s always interesting to see the community from a new perspective, including my own homestead. This is the view of my homestead from the base of the mountain (much zoomed and edited). The red arrow points to my house, the yellow arrow points to the house of my sister Monica/Tsakasile and her kids Zakhele and Mpendulo Siyabonga (the baby), the blue arrow is Mkhulu and Gogo’s house (and also where Melusi and Sisi Xolile live), and the green arrow points to the little rondavel where Sibongile, Zandile, Londiwe, Kwanele and Samkelo live. I felt a bit like a spy because I just sat up on top of the mountain and watched my family doing their daily chores.
The mountain top is covered with aloe plants, complete with bright orange flower things. Gorgeous.
Another big accomplishment of my week is having learned the proper method of eating sugar cane. Sugar cane is widely grown here in Swaziland, and about half of it is bought by the stalk by Swazis who can’t afford actual sweets. I’ve always refused it when offered, partly because it is terrible for your teeth and partly because I didn’t know the proper way to eat it. So my friend Lungelo Mthobisi gave me a step-by-step lesson. Step 1: using your molars, bite off the hard outer layer of the stalk and pull to strip it off the outside, exposing the somewhat softer white fibers in the middle. Step 2: keep doing that until all of the green hard outer shell is removed from the plant over an entire section (sugar cane is kind of like bamboo, so you attack one section at a time, down to the little knot in the stalk). Step 3: minimizing the amount of cane syrup you get on your clothes (this is hard for me), bite the white fibrous substance from the inside of the stalk into bite-sized pieces using your molars to break the thick fibers. Step 4: chew on the white fibrous substance in your mouth to squeeze out all of the cane syrup inside, much like a sponge. Step 5: remove the white fibrous stuff, now dry, with your hand and throw it on the floor/ground/in a designated bucket. And then repeat. I was surprised at how delicious the stuff is. (Maybe I shouldn’t have been…it’s cane syrup, which is basically like sugary water. And what’s not to love about sugar water?)
My neighbor Lindo playing a recorder sent to me in a care package. There are 5 of them left (the rest have been stolen), which means that on some days I have a 5-man recorder band playing in my house. It makes me admire my parents for not strangling me in 4th grade when I was learning to play (and therefore practicing) the recorder. Thanks, guys.
And that’s all for today! I’m off to Pasture Valley, then to Manzini for a workshop, then to Mbabane for a few meetings, a haircut (and color?), and another workshop. It’s an exciting life I lead.
Love from the Swaz!
(And also, congrats to the new group who will be leaving for Swaziland in a matter of hours! It’s the beginning of quite an adventure and, honestly, I’m a little jealous that they’re right at the beginning. Swaziland’s the place to be!)
This week, after a particularly terrible class at Jericho High School and nearly 3 hours sitting on a dusty road waiting for public transport, it was Bob Marley that brought me back. As I hurled my 30-pound backpack into the front seat of the long-awaited kombi, disappointed with my apathetic class, frustrated with the cold and windy weather, and angry at the high-decibel sermon blaring from the kombi’s speakers, I planned to wallow in self-pity for the duration of the trip home. Until, perhaps sensing my foul mood, the kombi driver put in a Bob Marley CD and cranked up the volume. Almost instantly, the driver and the kombi’s 10 other passengers started belting out the lyrics to “Is This Love” and “I Shot the Sheriff” and, suddenly, I remembered why I was in Swaziland: because nowhere else in the world would I find myself traveling down a winding dirt road in a mini-bus full of singing strangers…and call it “work.”
All in all it’s been a pretty good week, and I have high hopes for the foreseeable future. I’m making progress on my bus shelter billboard painting campaign and presenting my progress thus far to Peace Corps at a meeting on Thursday. I’m meeting this week with the borehole company that will hopefully be doing the water project in my community, and the clinic should know by the end of the week when we’ll get started on the garden part of the project. I’m representing the Bambanani project at a big event about recycling and attending a workshop about marketing Swazi handicrafts overseas. Plus I’m getting a long overdue haircut, which always makes for a good week. Amazing.
And now, for a change of format, here’s my week in photos:
I’ve become pretty well-acquainted with the bus rank in Nhlangano. Seriously, I spend a couple of hours there every week and, being the only white girl who frequents the place, I’ve gotten to know most of the pushy bus conductors, the men who offer to carry heavy bags for a couple of coins, the woman with the pronounced limp who sells oversized rolls of toilet paper and suspicious little bags of traditional herbs, the obnoxious kombi drivers who fight with each other and flirt shamelessly with me. I’ve even gotten to know the “schedules” of the kombis I take most frequently. Nothing is exact, but I’ve noticed that the kombi to Jericho High School usually fills between 8:15 and 8:30 in the morning, and that the kombi to Hluti hardly ever leaves between 11:15 and 2:00. And it only took me 2 years of sitting around in the bus rank to figure it out! Success, I say.
I think I’ve mentioned before the ridiculous importance that Swazi public schools place on sports. I know I’ve complained about my classes being cancelled for “sports day,” when schools are closed so that 15 soccer players from each school can meet in town for a day-long tournament without having make-up work to do. I’ve even attended the sports days to watch my students put 1000% more effort into their netball games than their English homework, but this is just too much. It’s the official crest of Jericho High School, which reads “Knowledge is power. Sport is life.” Really? I was pretty sure that sport was just a hobby for those of us not gifted enough to make a profession of it. For LeBron James, yes, sport is life. But for the rest of us, sport is less important than knowledge. (It’s supposed to be, at least.)
I’m continually impressed with the ingenuity of Swazi women, and my host family’s make (mother) Sibongile is no exception. Here, she’s weaving a grass mat using a homemade loom of sorts that’s made from a tree trunk with notches cut in it, white plastic fibers unwoven from a feed sack, and a bunch of C-sized batteries that she’s collected over the years. She wraps the fibers from the feed sacks around the batteries, which are attached to the loom, and then wraps the batteries around the pieces of grass to connect each piece of grass to the one before it. I sat and watched her do this for 20 minutes and still couldn’t figure out exactly how it worked, but she’s quite the grass mat-making professional and makes quite a business of selling them in the community, since these kinds of grass mats are what most people in the community (my host family included) sleep on. This particular one in the photo she was making for her niece Lindiwe who came to stay with us for most of the week.
On Tuesday, while sitting in the kombi at the Nhlangano bus rank, I realized that I didn’t have a photo of PSI’s “A Man Knows” logo and slogan, which I planned to paint on a billboard the following day. I guess I could’ve gone back to the internet cafe and printed one out, but instead I found one of my kombi conductor friends and asked him to find me one that I could photograph. PSI (an American NGO that does HIV-related work in Swaziland) started this campaign to get men to test for HIV that basically says that a REAL man knows his HIV status, and they’d been putting stickers with the logo and whatnot on kombis in Manzini and Mbabane. So all I had to do was find one of the stickers. Feeling lazy, I sent my friend off to find me a kombi with a sticker on it, which he did. But even after I’d gotten my photos, other kombi drivers kept coming up and wanting me to take photos of THEIR stickers, which they were obviously very proud of. It started an interesting conversation, among the kombi drivers and myself, about the campaign and the importance of testing and who had been tested and who hadn’t yet and what sorts of behaviors put men at risk for HIV. It’s so funny to see what sorts of educational endeavors actually STICK in Swaziland and which ones are completely ignored, and I was impressed with the effectiveness of this particular campaign. Kudos, PSI!
So on Wednesday, after finding my “thumbs up” logo in the bus rank, I set out to Hluti with fellow PCVs Darryn, Brandon, and Laura, to beautify the bus shelters with messages about the importance of HIV testing. We used the “A Man Knows” logo and whatnot from PSI, and also another of PSI’s campaigns about the importance of couples testing for HIV together. It was a fantasticly productive morning/afternoon, and I am VERY impressed with the outcome. I still have a few finishing touches to put on this week (like the hours that the clinic offers free testing), but I think we did a great job. We certainly attracted a lot of attention! In this photo is the “thumbs up” logo expertly drawn by Darryn and Brandon using the grid method that makes drawing possible for the artistically challenged.
The full sign reads “A Man Knows he is not a man until he tests.” There’s a bright yellow box on the far left where I’ll write “FREE TESTING” and then have the hours for free HIV testing at both Hluti Clinic and OLOS Clinic, but I need to confirm those things with the clinic staff before I make them public and somewhat permanent.
Our second billboard, which Laura and I primarily worked on, has a picture of a man and woman on it, then says “Tell her something that no one has told her before: Baby, let’s have that test!” (Beautiful lettering done by me! I'm getting pretty good at block letters, if I may say so myself.) It’s part of a campaign funded by Lusweti, PSI, USAID, the Swaziland Ministry of Health, and several other organizations, and I like the message. Although I’m still not convinced that there’s anything particularly romantic about having an HIV test…
Laura concentrating on her man’s hands. In the poster (which I actually posted a photo of about a year ago…it was my inspiration for the whole bus stop painting project), the man’s arms go up into a big heart shape around the woman’s face, and I think she captured the image perfectly. She says it’s her masterpiece and that she’s retiring from art.
While Laura was busy having actual artistic ability, I drew and painted this part of the billboard. It says “It’s not just an HIV test, it’s a love test.” Which I think is pretty catchy. We weren’t sure if the black parts on the top and upper right were supposed to be JUST a broken arrow or if they were also supposed to represent, in an abstract and somewhat implied way, the symbols for male and female. If so, brilliant. The part in the middle, where it says “The Love Test,” is supposed to be filled in with red, but I ran out of red paint and then decided that I like it this way anyway. (And, yes, the letters are supposed to be all irregular and uneven and whatnot, I'm not an idiot.)
My friend Shaun came down from Mbabane to help us put the finishing touches on the billboard, and then spent the evening hanging out with my host family and watching the Bafana Bafana versus Uruguay game. (Bafana Bafana is South Africa’s team.) Bafana Bafana, sadly, lost 3-0, but it was still fun to watch the game with the family. Plus he got to experience the madness that is my house full of children every night.
I’ve been trying to turn the World Cup fever (seriously, it’s everywhere) into a geography lesson for the kids on my homestead. And since the lesson involves trashing my floor with paint and gigantic pieces of paper left over from when I was teaching last year, they don’t even realize they’re learning! Here, my sisi (sister) Londiwe is painting the American flag. Obviously.
Kwanele likes to draw the South African flag. Most Swazi kids do, actually. It’s kind of sad. If you give a Swazi kid a piece of paper and crayons, he’ll either draw a soccer player, a WWE wrestler (John Cena or Batista), or the South African flag. It’s a skewed kind of patriotism, I think. And what does that say about their identity as Swazis? Wouldn’t you think it was weird if every time you gave an American kid a piece of paper they drew the Canadian flag? Hm.
This evil chicken bit me at precisely the moment this photo was taken. I was out at Pasture Valley visiting the kids and inspecting their new temporary chicken coop (which Uncle Chris, another PCV, is renovating and relocating) when this jerk decided that my left index finger was food. I was like 8 inches away from her cage! Apparently, she has a seriously long neck when she wants to. And then all of the kids laughed at me while I complained about my booboo.
Me and Buhle from Pasture Valley Children’s Home. The kids at PV had a fun time messing up my hair, which they always do. But this time it was so bad that I actually had to cut a little of my hair to get my hair tie out. It’s just hair; it’ll grow back, I say.
Auntie Jenny, another PCV, teaching the Grade 1 students to read and write. I’m sure they learn SOMETHING at school (actually, from what I’ve seen of Swazi schools I’m not entirely certain of that), but then they come home for an hour of after school tutoring in the preschool. They’re using the site reading cards that my parents sent me in a care package to practice sounding out words, then writing them in the handwriting books I ALSO got in a care package. Meanwhile, I’m just sitting in the back of the classroom taking pictures. (Later I did help with the writing portion of the lesson so I’m not completely useless.)
Finally, after what seems like forever, the JA Company at Jericho High School is producing! We spent several weeks making paper beads, then spent a week varnishing them, and then we spent this last week stringing them into necklaces. Theoretically, they’ll be selling them this week so that we can make more next week (and so I can get paid back the several hundred rand I’ve spend on buying them supplies to make their product), or whenever the students decide to show up again. My frustration with the program isn’t so much the students in these photos, it’s the drunk ones standing outside the classroom saying sexually inappropriate things to me through the broken windows and the ones who didn’t bother to show up to class that day. I have a pretty solid attendance of 12 for a class where 32 students are registered. I guess I shouldn’t be offended, though…that’s about the average attendance of my classes as UKZN (where I studied abroad in South Africa), so I don’t blame myself.
In our first actual production session, we produced 32 necklaces. Our plan was to make 80, but with so many kids absent 80 was a pretty unrealistic goal. Despite my frustrations, it was a proud moment for the group to finally see what they’ve been working on for weeks coming together. Hopefully now the product doesn’t get stolen (like many of the raw materials have…scissors, magazines, glue, more scissors, etc.) before they have a chance to sell it. But if it does, I guess I’ll just turn it into a lesson about good business practices in Swaziland?
After 2 years of staring longingly at it, I FINALLY conquered the mountain (really a big hill) behind my house! Several times in the past year I’ve set off to walk up to the top, but I’m always turned away by Mkhulu (grandpa) who tells stories of the 4-meter-long black mambas and the deadly puff adders that live in the rocks on the mountain or my bhuti (brother) Kwanele who emphasizes the importance of carrying a snake-whacking stick. But this time, Mkhulu was at church and everybody else was busy plowing the garden, so Eliza and I set out on an adventure. She’s been up the mountain hundreds of times because she goes up most evenings to round up the family’s cattle, so she was kind of like my guide. And we did find ONE snake, a brownish-looking thing that ran away as soon as Eliza barked at it and jumped in its general direction. I choose to believe that it was non-venomous.
As usual, I tried to make Eliza sit still for some photos. And failed. But look at that tongue!
And, 40 attempts later, a nice portrait of a girl and her dog. Awwww...
From the top of the mountain, you can see EVERYTHING in my community. It’s always interesting to see the community from a new perspective, including my own homestead. This is the view of my homestead from the base of the mountain (much zoomed and edited). The red arrow points to my house, the yellow arrow points to the house of my sister Monica/Tsakasile and her kids Zakhele and Mpendulo Siyabonga (the baby), the blue arrow is Mkhulu and Gogo’s house (and also where Melusi and Sisi Xolile live), and the green arrow points to the little rondavel where Sibongile, Zandile, Londiwe, Kwanele and Samkelo live. I felt a bit like a spy because I just sat up on top of the mountain and watched my family doing their daily chores.
The mountain top is covered with aloe plants, complete with bright orange flower things. Gorgeous.
Another big accomplishment of my week is having learned the proper method of eating sugar cane. Sugar cane is widely grown here in Swaziland, and about half of it is bought by the stalk by Swazis who can’t afford actual sweets. I’ve always refused it when offered, partly because it is terrible for your teeth and partly because I didn’t know the proper way to eat it. So my friend Lungelo Mthobisi gave me a step-by-step lesson. Step 1: using your molars, bite off the hard outer layer of the stalk and pull to strip it off the outside, exposing the somewhat softer white fibers in the middle. Step 2: keep doing that until all of the green hard outer shell is removed from the plant over an entire section (sugar cane is kind of like bamboo, so you attack one section at a time, down to the little knot in the stalk). Step 3: minimizing the amount of cane syrup you get on your clothes (this is hard for me), bite the white fibrous substance from the inside of the stalk into bite-sized pieces using your molars to break the thick fibers. Step 4: chew on the white fibrous substance in your mouth to squeeze out all of the cane syrup inside, much like a sponge. Step 5: remove the white fibrous stuff, now dry, with your hand and throw it on the floor/ground/in a designated bucket. And then repeat. I was surprised at how delicious the stuff is. (Maybe I shouldn’t have been…it’s cane syrup, which is basically like sugary water. And what’s not to love about sugar water?)
My neighbor Lindo playing a recorder sent to me in a care package. There are 5 of them left (the rest have been stolen), which means that on some days I have a 5-man recorder band playing in my house. It makes me admire my parents for not strangling me in 4th grade when I was learning to play (and therefore practicing) the recorder. Thanks, guys.
And that’s all for today! I’m off to Pasture Valley, then to Manzini for a workshop, then to Mbabane for a few meetings, a haircut (and color?), and another workshop. It’s an exciting life I lead.
Love from the Swaz!
(And also, congrats to the new group who will be leaving for Swaziland in a matter of hours! It’s the beginning of quite an adventure and, honestly, I’m a little jealous that they’re right at the beginning. Swaziland’s the place to be!)
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Bambanani
Also, check out the new website of the Bambanani project:
www.bambananiswaziland.com
For now it's really basic, but it will be running full force by the end of next week with more information about Caring for Shiselweni and the women and men involved in the project, as well as more photos of our products, the project, our workshops, and everyone involved.
(Also, if you happen to know of any one or any organization that would like to help fund the project, you should contact the project at bambananiswaziland@gmail.com!)
And I'd like to say THANKS to my sister, Erin, who not only designed that logo (the orange handprint), but also set up the website for me. Siyabonga kakhulu!
Cheers,
Justine
www.bambananiswaziland.com
For now it's really basic, but it will be running full force by the end of next week with more information about Caring for Shiselweni and the women and men involved in the project, as well as more photos of our products, the project, our workshops, and everyone involved.
(Also, if you happen to know of any one or any organization that would like to help fund the project, you should contact the project at bambananiswaziland@gmail.com!)
And I'd like to say THANKS to my sister, Erin, who not only designed that logo (the orange handprint), but also set up the website for me. Siyabonga kakhulu!
Cheers,
Justine
Friday, June 11, 2010
A tale of two cities.
Sometimes I am amazed at the range of extremes in my life. On one hand there’s the little earwig-infested hut I live in, the HIV epidemic that affects every facet of life in my community, the tiny plastic dish I call a bathtub, the mono-diet of various flavors of porridge that I subsist on, and all the other frustrations of my life as a Peace Corps Volunteer. On the other hand, there’s…well, House on Fire.
House on Fire (www.house-on-fire.com) is a sort of whimsical, artsy, eclectic concert/performance venue that hosts Swazi, South African and international bands, jazz musicians, poets, magicians (seriously), and all sorts of other performers in the Ezulwini Valley. On normal Friday/Saturday nights (when it’s open after more cultured performances), it’s a night club sort of place with DJs spinning hip-hop or kwaito (African techno) music, a lively dance floor, a full-service bar, and an interesting crowd of basically every expat/tourist/South African/white Swazi in the country. It’s basically the only place in Swaziland that is a guaranteed GOOD time EVERY time. And the Bushfire International Festival of the Arts, a 3-day music festival benefitting a local NGO called Young Heroes, is House on Fire at its finest. For 72 straight hours.
Last year’s Bushfire, if you remember, was a pretty memorable experience for me. Armed robbery, Johnny Clegg, zero sleep, torrential downpour, etc. It was a great time. And this year was no different.
Jenn and I kicked off our Bushfire weekend on Thursday afternoon with a 21-minute battle versus the Bambanani tent (24 minutes faster than the previous attempt!), but the actual fun started Friday evening when gates opened to the general public. In preparation for Bambanani’s debut on the Swazi "handicrafts made by disadvantaged women" scene, Jenn and I had spent the whole week preparing our craft stall, designing our business cards and packaging (with the help of my sister Erin who is a brilliant logo designer), making signs, and doing countless last-minute stock/quality control/inventory-related things. And then, Friday night and all day Saturday, we actually SOLD things. Maybe more important, we handed out business cards with info about the organization on it, we did an interview about the project with a local magazine, we talked to potential funders, and we just got our name out there. Amazing.
And then, after the craft stalls closed for the night, there was the music. Friday night’s headliner was the Parlotones, a South African rock band that that "fuses alternative rock with deftly crafted and darkly romantic lyrics" (according to the program). I’ve been listening to the Parlotones for the past 2 years on East Coast Radio, and I have to say that I was SUPER excited to see them in concert despite being made fun of by all the other PCVs for knowing all the songs. (They’re just jealous that they don’t get East Coast Radio. I’m slightly obsessed with the song "Push me to the floor," which you should probably download.) Then, Saturday night, Freshly Ground was back for the second time in 2 months, which was fine by me. Freshly Ground is a fantastic afro-pop-rock band made up of musicians from South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, and features the usual instruments plus an electric violin, a flute, a saxophone, and amazing lyrics in Zulu and English. Yeah, they're fantastic.
Other memorable acts included Lira, who is performing at the opening ceremony of the World Cup as I write this, Swazi musician Bholoja, American poet Coleman Barks, the Temaswati Project, and the ridiculous hip hop trifecta of KRTC, Mozaik and Akhona who rap lyrics like "God made this man, this man made money, and money made this man rich." (I remember those lyrics because I’ve seen them perform twice and they did that song twice at each performance. And those are pretty much the only words to that song.)
Anyway, it was an amazing experience that went off mostly without a hitch for me. I still lost my wallet like last year, but I’m pretty sure it was my own stupid fault and it was empty except for my driver’s license, which was actually returned to me. It still rained like last year, but I had a brand new Bushfire hoodie to keep me warm. And, even though I spent most of the daylight hours selling things for Bambanani, I had a blast. By Sunday I was so ridiculously exhausted from lack of sleep (I didn’t get more than 3 hours of sleep on Friday or Saturday nights) and so cold and wet that I checked out in the afternoon in favor of a hot shower and a warm bed. The terrible cold and mixed up days and nights I’ve been fighting since that weekend was TOTALLY worth it.
Anyway, it’s food for thought. The developmental disparity and cultural differences between the urban and rural areas of Swaziland have amazed me for the past 2 years, but Bushfire is so much like a weekend in America that, juxtaposed with my everyday life in Swaziland, it seems all the more ridiculous.
Not that my daily life is ALL filth, poverty and misery. In fact, these past weeks have been pretty fabulous. In brief:
My ongoing water and garden project with the support group is SLOWLY getting started. (Thanks, Swaziland, for making everything more difficult than it needs to be.) The support group submitted a new proposal to the inkhundla (county) to see if they’re serious about providing the fence, poles and seedlings for the garden, and we should either have a rejection letter or our supplies in the next week so that we can move forward with my part of the project. (I can’t start my part of the project unless I know what the inkhundla is paying for because their participation changes my budget entirely. Unfortunately, their slowness changes my timeline entirely as well…) Also, this coming week I was planning on meeting with the borehole company in Mbabane, but there’s been an outbreak of politically-motivated violence in Mbabane and surrounds, so Peace Corps has mandated that I put off my trip for another week. (Check out the Swazi Times online for more info.) But, for those of you who donated to the project, rest assured knowing that Peace Corps won’t even let me leave until it’s done, so it WILL happen. Soon.
I HAVE been making progress on the JA Company at Jericho High School. Twelve weeks after starting the 11-week program, we’re finally ready for week number 6, thanks to poor attendance and holidays and general apathy. But, for now, it’s going well. I’ve taught all the introductory lessons on entrepreneurship and business ethics and whatnot, we’ve elected our managers, we’ve written our business plan, and now we’re starting production of paper beads and necklaces (and I’m kind of kicking myself for contributing to the group’s brainstorming exercises). They FINALLY seem excited about spending their Saturday mornings in classes, and I’m trying my best to match their enthusiasm, despite the hellish endeavor that is transportation between my house and the school. (Seriously, after last week’s class I waited over 3 hours for a kombi going in the direction of my house, all the while being sexually harassed by the local soccer team and reflecting on how much better my life would be if only I had a car.)
Then again, if I had a car I would forfeit the opportunity to push 30 liters of paint around my community in a wheelbarrow. Why? Because the bus shelters I’m FINALLY getting around to painting are approximately half a mile away from my house and I can only fit 9 liters of paint in my backpack (which I sometimes do). After nearly 40 faxes (1 a week since late November) I FINALLY secured a letter of permission from the Ministry of Public Works and Transport and can paint the bus shelters without fear of it being deemed vandalism. My goal is to get 9 of them painted, which means I have to do about one a week for the rest of my time in Swaziland. It’s doable on my own, probably, but I’m still trying to recruit help from various NGOs, other volunteers and random strangers with artistic abilities. Until then, it’s just me and my "Where there is no Artist" book, which is both clever (a play on the classic village health care guidebook "Where there is no Doctor") and basic enough to be useful to someone as unskilled as me. (Please see photos below…)
And finally, after having had it rescheduled twice by the Peace Corps office, I managed to complete my Language Proficiency Interview to evaluate how much SiSwati I’ve learned in Swaziland. It’s an oral examination that’s recorded and then marked by a panel of linguists. And it’s nerve-wracking. On a scale from "novice low" to "advanced high," I scored a whopping ADVANCED LOW, which was super exciting for me (my goal was intermediate high) and means that I don’t have to take a foreign language as part of my MPH. Woohoo!
Plus, now I can start studying Kiswahili without fear of it compromising my SiSwati. So, for now…
Tutaonana! (That’s Swahili for "goodbye")
Justine
The preserved guavas and wild melon and ginger preserves made by the kids at Pasture Valley. They're both delicious and very very Swazi.
The craft stall at Bushfire. We had necklaces and earrings from Bambanani, macadamia nuts and pottery from Michelle's mother, greeting cards made by the kids at Pasture Valley, the preserves, bags made by the girls at Pasture Valley, and some grass mats with shiny foil chip bags woven in that were made by Gogo Constance from Pasture Valley.
Jenn varnishing necklaces and me standing around for moral support. I hate varnishing them when they're already made! (I like to varnish the individual beads because then I don't get it all over my hands.)
Baby Mpendulo Siyabonga is almost a year old! He's an active crawler and is ALMOST walking, which is scary because nobody watches him closely during the day. In a span of just a couple of hours, he fell down the cement steps in front of the main house, he crawled into the road by the house, he ate a handful of goat poop, and he dumped over the pig's feed bucket while the pigs were trying to eat. Danger! I wonder how much of the infant mortality rate in Swaziland can be attributed to inattentive babysitters...
Is it sad that the highlight of my week was when I accidentally bought 2-ply toilet paper? 2-ply toilet paper is EXPENSIVE in Swaziland, and I managed to find it for the same price as 1-ply! Also, the package says: "We have leen innauating and Dmpvauing" and "2 Dly Extra Saft." I don't even know what that first part is SUPPOSED to say.
The bus stop pre-makeover.
My backpack full of paint. It's a good idea until I accidentally forget to completely close a container and end up with a backpack full of paint, but until then it's a great alternative to pushing around a wheelbarrow.
Bus stop post-makeover. It says "Batali~ Kusheshe nisihlole ingati yetfu kukosenta siphile kadze! Bantfwana bangahlolwa iHIV kusukela banemaviki lasitfupha." Translated: "Parents ~ The sooner you test our blood, the longer we will live! Children can be tested for HIV 6 weeks after birth." I got the SiSwati from a brochure from Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, but turns out there was a typo and I had to scratch off "bangahlowa" and make it "bangahlolwa," which was super fun and took a ridiculously long time. Also, I'm aware that my girl has no feet. She WILL, she just has to wait until next week when I feel like drawing feet.
A close-up on that excellent baby. I pretty much rock. (I will paint the whites of his eyes next week when I finish the girl's feet.)
The dried out old river bed between the school and my house, plus the forest by my house from the OTHER side. I didn't realize it was so dense because I only see the other side of it where people are constantly cutting down trees for firewood.
Xolile and Kwandile filling up their water bottles in what's left of the "river." Water-bourne diseases, anyone?
My sisi Tsakasile carrying a bundle of wood on her head. She had me help her load it onto her head and I almost fell over just trying to lift it, but she managed to go hiking and climb over a fence (there's a bit of a ladder) with the bundle on her head. Amazing.
Finally, Eliza. I haven't posted a picture of my adorable puppy in a while, so I thought I should. Everyone in my community thinks I'm crazy for putting a bandana on the dog and they come to me saying that they want one too. Luckily, it says "Simply Dog" on the tag so I can prove to them that they're meant for dogs. Eliza loves it.
House on Fire (www.house-on-fire.com) is a sort of whimsical, artsy, eclectic concert/performance venue that hosts Swazi, South African and international bands, jazz musicians, poets, magicians (seriously), and all sorts of other performers in the Ezulwini Valley. On normal Friday/Saturday nights (when it’s open after more cultured performances), it’s a night club sort of place with DJs spinning hip-hop or kwaito (African techno) music, a lively dance floor, a full-service bar, and an interesting crowd of basically every expat/tourist/South African/white Swazi in the country. It’s basically the only place in Swaziland that is a guaranteed GOOD time EVERY time. And the Bushfire International Festival of the Arts, a 3-day music festival benefitting a local NGO called Young Heroes, is House on Fire at its finest. For 72 straight hours.
Last year’s Bushfire, if you remember, was a pretty memorable experience for me. Armed robbery, Johnny Clegg, zero sleep, torrential downpour, etc. It was a great time. And this year was no different.
Jenn and I kicked off our Bushfire weekend on Thursday afternoon with a 21-minute battle versus the Bambanani tent (24 minutes faster than the previous attempt!), but the actual fun started Friday evening when gates opened to the general public. In preparation for Bambanani’s debut on the Swazi "handicrafts made by disadvantaged women" scene, Jenn and I had spent the whole week preparing our craft stall, designing our business cards and packaging (with the help of my sister Erin who is a brilliant logo designer), making signs, and doing countless last-minute stock/quality control/inventory-related things. And then, Friday night and all day Saturday, we actually SOLD things. Maybe more important, we handed out business cards with info about the organization on it, we did an interview about the project with a local magazine, we talked to potential funders, and we just got our name out there. Amazing.
And then, after the craft stalls closed for the night, there was the music. Friday night’s headliner was the Parlotones, a South African rock band that that "fuses alternative rock with deftly crafted and darkly romantic lyrics" (according to the program). I’ve been listening to the Parlotones for the past 2 years on East Coast Radio, and I have to say that I was SUPER excited to see them in concert despite being made fun of by all the other PCVs for knowing all the songs. (They’re just jealous that they don’t get East Coast Radio. I’m slightly obsessed with the song "Push me to the floor," which you should probably download.) Then, Saturday night, Freshly Ground was back for the second time in 2 months, which was fine by me. Freshly Ground is a fantastic afro-pop-rock band made up of musicians from South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, and features the usual instruments plus an electric violin, a flute, a saxophone, and amazing lyrics in Zulu and English. Yeah, they're fantastic.
Other memorable acts included Lira, who is performing at the opening ceremony of the World Cup as I write this, Swazi musician Bholoja, American poet Coleman Barks, the Temaswati Project, and the ridiculous hip hop trifecta of KRTC, Mozaik and Akhona who rap lyrics like "God made this man, this man made money, and money made this man rich." (I remember those lyrics because I’ve seen them perform twice and they did that song twice at each performance. And those are pretty much the only words to that song.)
Anyway, it was an amazing experience that went off mostly without a hitch for me. I still lost my wallet like last year, but I’m pretty sure it was my own stupid fault and it was empty except for my driver’s license, which was actually returned to me. It still rained like last year, but I had a brand new Bushfire hoodie to keep me warm. And, even though I spent most of the daylight hours selling things for Bambanani, I had a blast. By Sunday I was so ridiculously exhausted from lack of sleep (I didn’t get more than 3 hours of sleep on Friday or Saturday nights) and so cold and wet that I checked out in the afternoon in favor of a hot shower and a warm bed. The terrible cold and mixed up days and nights I’ve been fighting since that weekend was TOTALLY worth it.
So now I’m 90 miles and a world away in my little hut, far removed from foreigners and running water and overpriced plastic cups of boxed wine. Seeing how the other 95% live.
Anyway, it’s food for thought. The developmental disparity and cultural differences between the urban and rural areas of Swaziland have amazed me for the past 2 years, but Bushfire is so much like a weekend in America that, juxtaposed with my everyday life in Swaziland, it seems all the more ridiculous.
Not that my daily life is ALL filth, poverty and misery. In fact, these past weeks have been pretty fabulous. In brief:
My ongoing water and garden project with the support group is SLOWLY getting started. (Thanks, Swaziland, for making everything more difficult than it needs to be.) The support group submitted a new proposal to the inkhundla (county) to see if they’re serious about providing the fence, poles and seedlings for the garden, and we should either have a rejection letter or our supplies in the next week so that we can move forward with my part of the project. (I can’t start my part of the project unless I know what the inkhundla is paying for because their participation changes my budget entirely. Unfortunately, their slowness changes my timeline entirely as well…) Also, this coming week I was planning on meeting with the borehole company in Mbabane, but there’s been an outbreak of politically-motivated violence in Mbabane and surrounds, so Peace Corps has mandated that I put off my trip for another week. (Check out the Swazi Times online for more info.) But, for those of you who donated to the project, rest assured knowing that Peace Corps won’t even let me leave until it’s done, so it WILL happen. Soon.
I HAVE been making progress on the JA Company at Jericho High School. Twelve weeks after starting the 11-week program, we’re finally ready for week number 6, thanks to poor attendance and holidays and general apathy. But, for now, it’s going well. I’ve taught all the introductory lessons on entrepreneurship and business ethics and whatnot, we’ve elected our managers, we’ve written our business plan, and now we’re starting production of paper beads and necklaces (and I’m kind of kicking myself for contributing to the group’s brainstorming exercises). They FINALLY seem excited about spending their Saturday mornings in classes, and I’m trying my best to match their enthusiasm, despite the hellish endeavor that is transportation between my house and the school. (Seriously, after last week’s class I waited over 3 hours for a kombi going in the direction of my house, all the while being sexually harassed by the local soccer team and reflecting on how much better my life would be if only I had a car.)
Then again, if I had a car I would forfeit the opportunity to push 30 liters of paint around my community in a wheelbarrow. Why? Because the bus shelters I’m FINALLY getting around to painting are approximately half a mile away from my house and I can only fit 9 liters of paint in my backpack (which I sometimes do). After nearly 40 faxes (1 a week since late November) I FINALLY secured a letter of permission from the Ministry of Public Works and Transport and can paint the bus shelters without fear of it being deemed vandalism. My goal is to get 9 of them painted, which means I have to do about one a week for the rest of my time in Swaziland. It’s doable on my own, probably, but I’m still trying to recruit help from various NGOs, other volunteers and random strangers with artistic abilities. Until then, it’s just me and my "Where there is no Artist" book, which is both clever (a play on the classic village health care guidebook "Where there is no Doctor") and basic enough to be useful to someone as unskilled as me. (Please see photos below…)
And finally, after having had it rescheduled twice by the Peace Corps office, I managed to complete my Language Proficiency Interview to evaluate how much SiSwati I’ve learned in Swaziland. It’s an oral examination that’s recorded and then marked by a panel of linguists. And it’s nerve-wracking. On a scale from "novice low" to "advanced high," I scored a whopping ADVANCED LOW, which was super exciting for me (my goal was intermediate high) and means that I don’t have to take a foreign language as part of my MPH. Woohoo!
Plus, now I can start studying Kiswahili without fear of it compromising my SiSwati. So, for now…
Tutaonana! (That’s Swahili for "goodbye")
Justine
The fabulous Bambanani sign, hand painted by yours truly. We put it up as the background behind the craft stall at Bushfire and, luckily, nobody complained about my butchering of the African continent.
The preserved guavas and wild melon and ginger preserves made by the kids at Pasture Valley. They're both delicious and very very Swazi.
The craft stall at Bushfire. We had necklaces and earrings from Bambanani, macadamia nuts and pottery from Michelle's mother, greeting cards made by the kids at Pasture Valley, the preserves, bags made by the girls at Pasture Valley, and some grass mats with shiny foil chip bags woven in that were made by Gogo Constance from Pasture Valley.
Jenn varnishing necklaces and me standing around for moral support. I hate varnishing them when they're already made! (I like to varnish the individual beads because then I don't get it all over my hands.)
Baby Mpendulo Siyabonga is almost a year old! He's an active crawler and is ALMOST walking, which is scary because nobody watches him closely during the day. In a span of just a couple of hours, he fell down the cement steps in front of the main house, he crawled into the road by the house, he ate a handful of goat poop, and he dumped over the pig's feed bucket while the pigs were trying to eat. Danger! I wonder how much of the infant mortality rate in Swaziland can be attributed to inattentive babysitters...
Is it sad that the highlight of my week was when I accidentally bought 2-ply toilet paper? 2-ply toilet paper is EXPENSIVE in Swaziland, and I managed to find it for the same price as 1-ply! Also, the package says: "We have leen innauating and Dmpvauing" and "2 Dly Extra Saft." I don't even know what that first part is SUPPOSED to say.
The bus stop pre-makeover.
My backpack full of paint. It's a good idea until I accidentally forget to completely close a container and end up with a backpack full of paint, but until then it's a great alternative to pushing around a wheelbarrow.
Bus stop post-makeover. It says "Batali~ Kusheshe nisihlole ingati yetfu kukosenta siphile kadze! Bantfwana bangahlolwa iHIV kusukela banemaviki lasitfupha." Translated: "Parents ~ The sooner you test our blood, the longer we will live! Children can be tested for HIV 6 weeks after birth." I got the SiSwati from a brochure from Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, but turns out there was a typo and I had to scratch off "bangahlowa" and make it "bangahlolwa," which was super fun and took a ridiculously long time. Also, I'm aware that my girl has no feet. She WILL, she just has to wait until next week when I feel like drawing feet.
A close-up on that excellent baby. I pretty much rock. (I will paint the whites of his eyes next week when I finish the girl's feet.)
I walked my sisi Xolile and her friend Kwandile (our neighbor) home from school the other day. They're 5 and 4, respectively, and walk 7 kilometers one way to preschool every day. We took the "shortcut" home through the woods and over a fence and through a river and back up a really steep hill, and they kicked my butt. I'm so out of shape.
The dried out old river bed between the school and my house, plus the forest by my house from the OTHER side. I didn't realize it was so dense because I only see the other side of it where people are constantly cutting down trees for firewood.
Xolile and Kwandile filling up their water bottles in what's left of the "river." Water-bourne diseases, anyone?
My sisi Tsakasile carrying a bundle of wood on her head. She had me help her load it onto her head and I almost fell over just trying to lift it, but she managed to go hiking and climb over a fence (there's a bit of a ladder) with the bundle on her head. Amazing.
Finally, Eliza. I haven't posted a picture of my adorable puppy in a while, so I thought I should. Everyone in my community thinks I'm crazy for putting a bandana on the dog and they come to me saying that they want one too. Luckily, it says "Simply Dog" on the tag so I can prove to them that they're meant for dogs. Eliza loves it.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
The internet is really slow today.
I tried to upload a video to Blogger and it took 3 hours and then gave me an error message, so instead I uploaded it to YouTube and you should check it out:
Just Another Friday in the Swaz...
Crossing the lawn in front of the volunteers’ cottage at Pasture Valley, Jenn and I were spooked by a sudden rustling in the bushes on the edge of the nearby woods. We stopped dead in our tracks, took a moment to convince ourselves that there was a stray cow or dog or goat in the dark woods behind the cottage, then resumed our discussion of the sweet potato soup we had planned for dinner. By the light of our cell phones, we made our way onto the cottage’s little porch and juggled our bags to get the key in the door.
In the dim light from the children’s home that came in through the door we could see something lying on the floor in the hallway—something black and lumpy and very out of place. Cautiously I flipped on the breakers and turned on the lights.
Lying in the hallway was a black fleece blanket—the black fleece blanket that was SUPPOSED to be on my bed—and two pillows, also from my bed. Confused, I looked into my bedroom. The bed had been stripped, and Jenn’s blankets were all gone, too. Immediately, we assumed that the kids or the house mothers at the children’s home had decided to wash our linens, which seemed strange but not impossible. And then, after a couple moments of confusion, I realized that my big bag full of clothes was gone. Jenn’s shoes were gone. My backpack, a foam mattress, several spare comforters, gone. We’d been robbed!
Jenn and I stepped out onto the porch to figure out how they’d gotten in (chisel and screwdriver) and to decide what to do next when, to our horror, we heard voices coming from a tree about 30 meters from where we were standing. Whispering, rustling leaves, people. They were still in the woods, watching us! (I took the opportunity to remind them that they were violating a Commandment, which seemed the most logical thing to do at the time.)
Immediately we called Michelle and Peter for help. Peter jumped into his bakkie (small pick-up) and came down with a flashlight and a pistol to sort things out, and the neighbor was dispatched to block off the most likely escape route with his truck. After 15 minutes of fruitless searching, Peter fired a shot into the air to see if he could SCARE the burglars out of their hiding place. It did.
Immediately the burglars (3 of them?) stood up from their hiding place under a big jacaranda tree, turned on their phone flashlights (cell phones here often have flashlights on the top), and came running towards the cottage en route to the main road behind the house. Meanwhile, Jenn and I were freaking out: we’d heard a gunshot from a gun we could only HOPE was Peter’s, criminals were running straight towards us in a panic, and our only refuge from the madness was a house without a locking door. The closest thing to a weapon we could find in the house was an 8-inch bread knife, which didn’t offer us much peace of mind.
Long story short, they got away. We spent the whole evening giving statements to the police (who kept asking really inappropriate and irrelevant questions about my marital status and sexual preferences) and trying to piece together what had happened and what was missing.
Apparently, after forcing their way into the house and discovering that the electricity was turned off, they found their way around the house using the bulk of a box of matches, which we found strewn around the floor in the cottage. This means that they were obviously there in the dark, which is scary because it had only been dark about 15 minutes when we got home, so they had JUST been there. They made off with my big clothing bag (the contents of which they left behind, thankfully), and rooted through all the kitchen cabinets in search of…something. (The only thing they took from the kitchen was a bag full of plastic grocery bags, which we later found in the woods.) From the bedrooms they took Jenn’s flip-flops, three duvets, a set of sheets, three wool blankets, a foam mattress, the daypack that matches my big backpack, and my new scarf. We (and the police) think that they probably broke into the house earlier that day or the previous night, but had come back for more. Fortunately (because they didn’t get more) or unfortunately (because we were scared to death), we interrupted their second attempt.
It could have been worse, though. We could have been there when they broke in, or walked in on them robbing us and had to deal with them when they were cornered and defensive. We could have dropped our bags off there in the afternoon, like we normally do, and I could have had my computer or external hard drive or money stolen. They could have taken more essential or expensive things like the countertop oven unit or the DVDs. They could have been armed and stood up to Peter, or they could have come back. (They did actually come back that night because one of them dropped a cell phone. We could hear it but didn’t think it was smart to go rooting through the woods in search of a burglar’s cell phone. By morning it was gone, which means they came back for it later that night. Creepy.) All things considered, it was a pretty pathetic robbery on their part, which is lucky for us. (It could have been better though…had we brought the dog with us like we normally do, had we put the padlock on the burglar door, had we left the outside lights on…)
The only thing I’m really upset about (aside from the whole feeling like my space and privacy were violated and being suspicious of every man I see on the road around the cottage) is that they got away with the fantastic wool blanket I bought in Lesotho. Remember the one I raved about for a full paragraph in Blog about Lesotho? Yeah, the superblanket that got me through one of the coldest and wettest nights of my life, and my only souvenir of Lesotho: gone. Jenn’s too. The frustrating thing is that last week I literally had it in my bag to take it home but then decided that I was sick and didn’t feel like carrying it. The good news, though, is that the blanket is really distinctive and I have a photo of it to prove that it’s mine so there’s a very very slim chance of finding it hanging on someone’s laundry line or something. In all likelihood, though, the only thing that’s going to come out of having reported this to the police is the daily phone calls and text messages I keep getting to remind me that I’m beautiful and that various officers would like to marry/procreate with me. (Sexual harassment in Swaziland knows no boundaries.) But if I see anyone wearing my scarf or carrying my backpack, I’m going to seriously consider punching them in the face.
HOPEFULLY this was a one-time thing, but I’m still going to be more cautious in the future. The scary part about having interrupted them in their robbery is that there’s obviously something in the house they still want, which means that maybe they’ll come back. But we’re trying our best to prevent that. Michelle and Peter are beefing up security around the cottage (the electric fence had been shorted out so they’re going to fix it and try to prevent it in the future), keeping the outside lights on at the cottage, doing nightly checks of the property. There’s also the burglar door (which we stupidly had left unlocked), bars over all the windows, and a new handle/lock and deadbolt on the door, which should hopefully deter future attempts to break in. And in the future I’ll insist on having Ted, the farm’s 150-pound dog, escort me to the cottage. And I’ve ordered some pepper spray, which I think is more for my psychological well-being than anything. (It’s never fun to feel unsafe where you live/work, and this ordeal has made me super paranoid.)
[Note for Group 8 volunteers coming next month: Don’t be freaked out by this! It really is rare in Swaziland, and basically unheard of on our homesteads because of our houses’ proximity to other houses and people and dogs. BUT, that said, I would recommend two things: (1) bring a key-entry padlock (Master lock) because all the ones you buy here have similar keys, rust shut, and are easily opened with methylated spirits or other chemicals, and (2) ALWAYS lock your burglar door, especially at night, so that you don’t kick yourself later if you DO get robbed. If our burglar door had been locked, this probably never would have happened.]
In OTHER news…
Compared to the weekend, my week has been pretty uneventful. (Maybe that’s because it’s only been 4 days since my last Blog post…)
I DID have a couple more meetings with the Support Group and the head nurse at Our Lady of Sorrows clinic in an attempt to get started with my partnership project. I’m a little discouraged because I thought the project would take off right after getting funded, but, as usual, Swaziland has delayed progress unnecessarily. A couple of weeks ago, the executive committee sat through a couple of meetings to get official permission from the chief to do the project, then to get permission from the inkhundla (county) committee. (I didn’t take part in this because the meetings are like 6 hours long and 100% in SiSwati.) Today, three of the Support Group members headed out to the existing garden to decide if they want to expand it or not, to count the number of holes we need to dig, and to draw up a work schedule so that all the Support Group’s members are included in the project. Yeah, it’s finally almost starting to happen.
And then yesterday I got some very unexpected news. For almost 2 years the clinic’s head nurse and the Support Group’s executive committee have been submitting monthly proposals to the inkhundla (county) to get poles, fence, and tools for the garden. For almost 2 years, the committee has either ignored these proposals or outright rejected them…until I went off and secured funding from another source. Apparently when the Support Group’s Chairperson asked for permission to do the project it reminded the inkhundla that the other proposal existed, and now they’re offering to help with the project. They have “promised” (I won’t believe it until I see it!) to purchase and deliver the poles and fencing for the project with money provided by the government for rural development projects, and they’ve said that we will have the supplies by mid-June. This is fantastic because (1) it gets the local community involved in the project and gives them ownership of the final product, and (2) it frees up more money from MY budget to expand the garden or buy fruit trees or host a larger nutrition workshop or put more taps in to distribute water from the borehole. But it’s also annoying because it shouldn’t take ME raising funds for the inkhundla committee to do its job! (According to government, hundreds of thousands of Emalangeni in rural development funds remain unspent every year because “people don’t apply for the grants.” Really, it’s because the inkhundla doesn’t bother to distribute the funds because they don’t want to oversee the projects. Frustrating.) Plus, now we can’t buy any supplies until we find out what they’re planning on paying for. Another delay, but hopefully it will be worth our while.
Meanwhile, I’m focusing on the Bambanani project. We have a week to roll, varnish, and string hundreds of beads, put together some mobiles, make at least 40 more pairs of earrings, figure out packaging for all our products, design and build a display table of sorts, create a new business card and product tag, decide on prices, and organize ourselves for what will hopefully be a successful weekend of sales at Bushfire Music Festival. And, considering that most of our products are made of paper, we’re crossing our fingers that there won’t be a torrential downpour at the concert like there was last year…
That’s all for now. I have a fabulous afternoon full of movies and paper bead rolling ahead of me. I love my job.
Love from the Swaz!
Justine/Phindile
(P.S. If any Group 8 volunteer has questions in the next month, feel free to contact me at Justine.amos@gmail.com. If not, I’ll see you in July!)
These are the fantastic flowers that many of the aloe plants in Swaziland grow this time of year. Sometimes, if the aloe plants are very old, there are HUNDREDS of them in a big bunch, one on top of each other, each with a bright orange and yellow flower thing. This one is probably about 10 inches tall and 6 inches in circumference.
Two of the boys at Pasture Valley Children's Home preparing melon for our melon and ginger preserves. The melon they use is called something like "beca" (the c is a click) and looks and tastes like an unripe watermelon. (You know the part between the pink of the melon and the rind? Yeah, the whole melon tastes like that.) Swazis usually chop and boil it down into a porridge-like consistency, then eat it as a dessert with lots of sugar. Or feed it to pigs. It grows wild in most areas.
Three of our women from the Dwaleni group showing off the necklaces they made. We've been working with the women since mid-March and so far have produced 82 necklaces, which is pretty amazing. Every week the quality and creativity is improving, and we're really optimistic about the future of the project. (Which is good because right now we're financing it 100% out of pocket...)
Day 4 of African Tick Bite Fever. I don't think this photo adequately conveys the nastiness that was (and still is) this sore. After this stage, it formed a gross little blister thing in the middle, which burst, and then the whole thing started rotting away. Unfortunately I don't have photos of that stage of the sickness because the antibiotic cream I put on it made it extremely reflective so none of the photos came out. But, trust me, it was gross.
Two of the girls at Pasture Valley and Gogo Constance (one of the house mothers) making earrings and necklaces for the Bushfire Music Festival. Each of the kids who wants to help us make jewelry gets paid for their creations, and the two who are the most involved with the project get to come to the music festival to sell with us. Gogo mostly just makes earrings for herself.
In the dim light from the children’s home that came in through the door we could see something lying on the floor in the hallway—something black and lumpy and very out of place. Cautiously I flipped on the breakers and turned on the lights.
Lying in the hallway was a black fleece blanket—the black fleece blanket that was SUPPOSED to be on my bed—and two pillows, also from my bed. Confused, I looked into my bedroom. The bed had been stripped, and Jenn’s blankets were all gone, too. Immediately, we assumed that the kids or the house mothers at the children’s home had decided to wash our linens, which seemed strange but not impossible. And then, after a couple moments of confusion, I realized that my big bag full of clothes was gone. Jenn’s shoes were gone. My backpack, a foam mattress, several spare comforters, gone. We’d been robbed!
Jenn and I stepped out onto the porch to figure out how they’d gotten in (chisel and screwdriver) and to decide what to do next when, to our horror, we heard voices coming from a tree about 30 meters from where we were standing. Whispering, rustling leaves, people. They were still in the woods, watching us! (I took the opportunity to remind them that they were violating a Commandment, which seemed the most logical thing to do at the time.)
Immediately we called Michelle and Peter for help. Peter jumped into his bakkie (small pick-up) and came down with a flashlight and a pistol to sort things out, and the neighbor was dispatched to block off the most likely escape route with his truck. After 15 minutes of fruitless searching, Peter fired a shot into the air to see if he could SCARE the burglars out of their hiding place. It did.
Immediately the burglars (3 of them?) stood up from their hiding place under a big jacaranda tree, turned on their phone flashlights (cell phones here often have flashlights on the top), and came running towards the cottage en route to the main road behind the house. Meanwhile, Jenn and I were freaking out: we’d heard a gunshot from a gun we could only HOPE was Peter’s, criminals were running straight towards us in a panic, and our only refuge from the madness was a house without a locking door. The closest thing to a weapon we could find in the house was an 8-inch bread knife, which didn’t offer us much peace of mind.
Long story short, they got away. We spent the whole evening giving statements to the police (who kept asking really inappropriate and irrelevant questions about my marital status and sexual preferences) and trying to piece together what had happened and what was missing.
Apparently, after forcing their way into the house and discovering that the electricity was turned off, they found their way around the house using the bulk of a box of matches, which we found strewn around the floor in the cottage. This means that they were obviously there in the dark, which is scary because it had only been dark about 15 minutes when we got home, so they had JUST been there. They made off with my big clothing bag (the contents of which they left behind, thankfully), and rooted through all the kitchen cabinets in search of…something. (The only thing they took from the kitchen was a bag full of plastic grocery bags, which we later found in the woods.) From the bedrooms they took Jenn’s flip-flops, three duvets, a set of sheets, three wool blankets, a foam mattress, the daypack that matches my big backpack, and my new scarf. We (and the police) think that they probably broke into the house earlier that day or the previous night, but had come back for more. Fortunately (because they didn’t get more) or unfortunately (because we were scared to death), we interrupted their second attempt.
It could have been worse, though. We could have been there when they broke in, or walked in on them robbing us and had to deal with them when they were cornered and defensive. We could have dropped our bags off there in the afternoon, like we normally do, and I could have had my computer or external hard drive or money stolen. They could have taken more essential or expensive things like the countertop oven unit or the DVDs. They could have been armed and stood up to Peter, or they could have come back. (They did actually come back that night because one of them dropped a cell phone. We could hear it but didn’t think it was smart to go rooting through the woods in search of a burglar’s cell phone. By morning it was gone, which means they came back for it later that night. Creepy.) All things considered, it was a pretty pathetic robbery on their part, which is lucky for us. (It could have been better though…had we brought the dog with us like we normally do, had we put the padlock on the burglar door, had we left the outside lights on…)
The only thing I’m really upset about (aside from the whole feeling like my space and privacy were violated and being suspicious of every man I see on the road around the cottage) is that they got away with the fantastic wool blanket I bought in Lesotho. Remember the one I raved about for a full paragraph in Blog about Lesotho? Yeah, the superblanket that got me through one of the coldest and wettest nights of my life, and my only souvenir of Lesotho: gone. Jenn’s too. The frustrating thing is that last week I literally had it in my bag to take it home but then decided that I was sick and didn’t feel like carrying it. The good news, though, is that the blanket is really distinctive and I have a photo of it to prove that it’s mine so there’s a very very slim chance of finding it hanging on someone’s laundry line or something. In all likelihood, though, the only thing that’s going to come out of having reported this to the police is the daily phone calls and text messages I keep getting to remind me that I’m beautiful and that various officers would like to marry/procreate with me. (Sexual harassment in Swaziland knows no boundaries.) But if I see anyone wearing my scarf or carrying my backpack, I’m going to seriously consider punching them in the face.
HOPEFULLY this was a one-time thing, but I’m still going to be more cautious in the future. The scary part about having interrupted them in their robbery is that there’s obviously something in the house they still want, which means that maybe they’ll come back. But we’re trying our best to prevent that. Michelle and Peter are beefing up security around the cottage (the electric fence had been shorted out so they’re going to fix it and try to prevent it in the future), keeping the outside lights on at the cottage, doing nightly checks of the property. There’s also the burglar door (which we stupidly had left unlocked), bars over all the windows, and a new handle/lock and deadbolt on the door, which should hopefully deter future attempts to break in. And in the future I’ll insist on having Ted, the farm’s 150-pound dog, escort me to the cottage. And I’ve ordered some pepper spray, which I think is more for my psychological well-being than anything. (It’s never fun to feel unsafe where you live/work, and this ordeal has made me super paranoid.)
[Note for Group 8 volunteers coming next month: Don’t be freaked out by this! It really is rare in Swaziland, and basically unheard of on our homesteads because of our houses’ proximity to other houses and people and dogs. BUT, that said, I would recommend two things: (1) bring a key-entry padlock (Master lock) because all the ones you buy here have similar keys, rust shut, and are easily opened with methylated spirits or other chemicals, and (2) ALWAYS lock your burglar door, especially at night, so that you don’t kick yourself later if you DO get robbed. If our burglar door had been locked, this probably never would have happened.]
In OTHER news…
Compared to the weekend, my week has been pretty uneventful. (Maybe that’s because it’s only been 4 days since my last Blog post…)
I DID have a couple more meetings with the Support Group and the head nurse at Our Lady of Sorrows clinic in an attempt to get started with my partnership project. I’m a little discouraged because I thought the project would take off right after getting funded, but, as usual, Swaziland has delayed progress unnecessarily. A couple of weeks ago, the executive committee sat through a couple of meetings to get official permission from the chief to do the project, then to get permission from the inkhundla (county) committee. (I didn’t take part in this because the meetings are like 6 hours long and 100% in SiSwati.) Today, three of the Support Group members headed out to the existing garden to decide if they want to expand it or not, to count the number of holes we need to dig, and to draw up a work schedule so that all the Support Group’s members are included in the project. Yeah, it’s finally almost starting to happen.
And then yesterday I got some very unexpected news. For almost 2 years the clinic’s head nurse and the Support Group’s executive committee have been submitting monthly proposals to the inkhundla (county) to get poles, fence, and tools for the garden. For almost 2 years, the committee has either ignored these proposals or outright rejected them…until I went off and secured funding from another source. Apparently when the Support Group’s Chairperson asked for permission to do the project it reminded the inkhundla that the other proposal existed, and now they’re offering to help with the project. They have “promised” (I won’t believe it until I see it!) to purchase and deliver the poles and fencing for the project with money provided by the government for rural development projects, and they’ve said that we will have the supplies by mid-June. This is fantastic because (1) it gets the local community involved in the project and gives them ownership of the final product, and (2) it frees up more money from MY budget to expand the garden or buy fruit trees or host a larger nutrition workshop or put more taps in to distribute water from the borehole. But it’s also annoying because it shouldn’t take ME raising funds for the inkhundla committee to do its job! (According to government, hundreds of thousands of Emalangeni in rural development funds remain unspent every year because “people don’t apply for the grants.” Really, it’s because the inkhundla doesn’t bother to distribute the funds because they don’t want to oversee the projects. Frustrating.) Plus, now we can’t buy any supplies until we find out what they’re planning on paying for. Another delay, but hopefully it will be worth our while.
Meanwhile, I’m focusing on the Bambanani project. We have a week to roll, varnish, and string hundreds of beads, put together some mobiles, make at least 40 more pairs of earrings, figure out packaging for all our products, design and build a display table of sorts, create a new business card and product tag, decide on prices, and organize ourselves for what will hopefully be a successful weekend of sales at Bushfire Music Festival. And, considering that most of our products are made of paper, we’re crossing our fingers that there won’t be a torrential downpour at the concert like there was last year…
That’s all for now. I have a fabulous afternoon full of movies and paper bead rolling ahead of me. I love my job.
Love from the Swaz!
Justine/Phindile
(P.S. If any Group 8 volunteer has questions in the next month, feel free to contact me at Justine.amos@gmail.com. If not, I’ll see you in July!)
These are the fantastic flowers that many of the aloe plants in Swaziland grow this time of year. Sometimes, if the aloe plants are very old, there are HUNDREDS of them in a big bunch, one on top of each other, each with a bright orange and yellow flower thing. This one is probably about 10 inches tall and 6 inches in circumference.
Some of the earrings made by the older girls at Pasture Valley Children's Home. The green and orange one on the right uses some of the seeds we gathered last week from a tree next to the building where we have our workshops. We gathered hundreds of seed pods, each with about 15 seeds inside, and drilled holes through each individual seed. We also use acorns (which we varnish to a nice shine) and the seeds from an indigenous melon that look kind of like red watermelon seeds.
Two of the boys at Pasture Valley Children's Home preparing melon for our melon and ginger preserves. The melon they use is called something like "beca" (the c is a click) and looks and tastes like an unripe watermelon. (You know the part between the pink of the melon and the rind? Yeah, the whole melon tastes like that.) Swazis usually chop and boil it down into a porridge-like consistency, then eat it as a dessert with lots of sugar. Or feed it to pigs. It grows wild in most areas.
Three of our women from the Dwaleni group showing off the necklaces they made. We've been working with the women since mid-March and so far have produced 82 necklaces, which is pretty amazing. Every week the quality and creativity is improving, and we're really optimistic about the future of the project. (Which is good because right now we're financing it 100% out of pocket...)
Day 4 of African Tick Bite Fever. I don't think this photo adequately conveys the nastiness that was (and still is) this sore. After this stage, it formed a gross little blister thing in the middle, which burst, and then the whole thing started rotting away. Unfortunately I don't have photos of that stage of the sickness because the antibiotic cream I put on it made it extremely reflective so none of the photos came out. But, trust me, it was gross.
Two of the girls at Pasture Valley and Gogo Constance (one of the house mothers) making earrings and necklaces for the Bushfire Music Festival. Each of the kids who wants to help us make jewelry gets paid for their creations, and the two who are the most involved with the project get to come to the music festival to sell with us. Gogo mostly just makes earrings for herself.
This is about how many beads I can make in a particularly productive evening of movies and paper bead rolling. I tend to go for the bright colors, but lately I've also been making beads that are just white with black print on them and I've been stringing them with brightly colored glass beads. I've also been making some out of newspaper and then painting them with designs before varnishing them, which is a pretty unique look. I also made the bowl they're in out of paper mache one day when I was bored and had some excess newspaper and glue.
Monday, May 17, 2010
The beginning of the end...
I first had the realization that I’d be leaving Swaziland while ringing in the New Year at House on Fire. I saw people running around with funny “2010” hats and thought to myself, “Man, that’s the year I leave Swaziland!” Since then, I’ve tried in earnest to suppress that realization, and I’ve been pretty successful. Until, of course, Peace Corps decided to host a conference all about how we have to leave Swaziland and go back to the scary world where people don’t consider playing with children and making paper beads actual work. So now it’s official: I’m leaving (in a few months).
I don’t know why, but I’m surprised by this. When I first arrived in Swaziland almost 2 years ago, 26 months seemed like a lifetime. Now, 22 months later, I can’t decide if it’s been the slowest or fastest 22 months of my life. In some ways, it seems like I’ve only just arrived: I haven’t accomplished as much as I thought I would during my time, I still have a lot of siSwati I’d like to learn, I find out new things about my community/neighbors/Swaziland every day, and I still quite vividly remember my last mango margarita in Philly the night before I left the US. (Yes, I had margaritas with my last dinner in the US. Surprised?) But in some ways, it feels like I’ve been here forever: I feel at home in my little hut, I have a wonderful host family that I’m very close to and an adorable dog, I’ve seen babies born and students graduate high school, and I’ve completed several worthwhile projects in the community. And now that I have worked so hard to establish relationships and a role and “roots” in the community, I have to pack up and leave to go on to the rest of my life. And, since this time I’m not blinded by the excitement of the adventure of Peace Corps, I think leaving Swaziland will be a lot more difficult than leaving the US was.
The biggest worry for me is leaving my host family. When I left the US, I knew that my friends and family would be fine without me. I planned to talk to them on the phone, they promised to send care packages, some planned to visit, and I knew that I would still have them when I returned to the US. But now, as I prepare to leave Swaziland, I don’t have that. What if, after I leave, baby Mpendulo gets sick and nobody has E5 ($0.75) to take him to the clinic and he ends up with pneumonia? If Mkhulu dies, what happens to all of the kids on the homestead? Who will be around to answer Gogo’s questions when the nurses at the clinic change her ARV medication and she doesn’t understand the new dosage instructions? Who will feed Eliza and douse her in flea powder every week and call the vet if she gets sick? How will I know if the people I love are sick or hungry or can’t afford to pay for school? Even if I DO know, what can I possibly do about it from half a world away?
Sometimes when I’m particularly frustrated with some aspect of life in Swaziland—gender inequality, apathetic teachers, limited access to medical care, etc.—I remind myself that I’m only here for 2 years and that the whole experience is kind of temporary. When I’ve needed money in the past 22 months, I’ve tapped into my bank account in the US, and I’ve always known that I have my parents as a financial safety net. When I’ve run out of food, I’ve gone to town to buy more so I didn’t have to go to bed hungry. Peace Corps has always been a phone call away for medical or safety-related emergencies, ready to send a car for me. And I’ve always known that if it got really bad, I could just quit and go back to the US where things were more normal.
But for the people I’m leaving behind here, Swaziland IS their normal. It’s all they know, and there’s no escaping it. For the kids on my homestead, poor quality education and untrained teachers IS their normal. Prohibitively expensive emergency services that only operate Monday through Friday ARE normal in Swaziland. The girls on my homestead will be the targets of sexual harassment their whole lives, and the boys will probably grow up to be perpetually unemployed. While I’m busy studying at Tulane and traveling through Africa, the 25-year-old women in my community will be taking care of their 4 children and hoping that their husbands don’t bring HIV home from their other girlfriends/wives. While I’m buying new clothes and eating at all-you-can-eat buffets in the US, my host bhutis and sisis will be mending their old school uniforms and eating the same porridge-and-veggie mixture they eat every night. How do I leave Swaziland and return to “normal” life in the US without being overwhelmed by guilt and worry?
This, essentially, is what we talked about at our Close of Service (COS) conference: what we’ve done, what we’ve learned, how we’ve changed, and all of the emotional and logistical things we have to deal with when we leave and attempt to re-establish a life back in the US. In addition to forcing me to think about all the anxiety associated with leaving Swaziland, COS conference also made me realize just how much I’ve changed over the past 2 years. There are all the obvious things like learning a new language and finding a passion for public health, but there’s a whole slue of more subtle things, too. I’ve become more confident in an ‘I can do anything’ slash ‘Don’t mind me, I’m just singing in public’ kind of way. I’ve learned how to be alone without being lonely. I’ve developed a tea-and-biscuits habit and have actually come to see it as a necessary part of a productive day. I’ve re-defined concepts like “walking distance” and “keep refrigerated.” I’ve learned to be less wasteful, to make the most of what I have without wanting more, and to take quick water-saving showers (which is a pretty amazing feat for me). I’ve gotten over my fear of fire and I’ve caught myself saying things like, “Oh good, it’s just a bat.” And that’s just what I see.
The past two years have been an incredible journey for me, both personally and professionally—an experience I wouldn’t trade for all the running water and reliable public transportation in the world. And, even though my Peace Corps service is coming to an end, I know that I’m not done with Swaziland. I’ll definitely come back to visit my host family (and Eliza) and to check up on the sustainability of my projects. Maybe I’ll end up doing research for my Master’s thesis in Swaziland (it IS a pretty good place to do HIV-related research), or I’ll come back as a volunteer. Or maybe after graduate school I’ll come back as a public health professional so I have more to give.
But, for now, I’m focusing on finishing up projects and tying up loose ends before I leave. With that and all the paperwork I have to do for Peace Corps, it’s going to be a busy final three and a half months! So here’s what’s going on in the Swaz:
1. My partnership project (the community garden and water project that many of you helped to fund) is FINALLY getting off the ground. The support group has harvested all of the maize they planted last year, and after a good burn we’ll be ready to extend the fence and put in the new poles (hopefully starting this week). Meanwhile, the borehole-digging company has agreed to do a new survey for free (it usually costs about $1500), which is fantastic money-saving news but, unfortunately, means that they will be surveying at their leisure. I’ll keep you all updated on the progress of the project in the coming weeks.
2. Our jewelry-making project, Bambanani, is gearing up for its first big exhibition at Bushfire Music Festival at the end of the month. So far, our group of ladies (with the help of the older girls at Pasture Valley) have made 82 necklaces, 64 pairs of earrings, 3 bracelets, and a whole bunch of cloth bags and preserves. We’re trying to incorporate all sorts of found or recycled art, including acorns and other seeds we find in the bush and rolled paper beads, to create unique “wearable art” items. Bushfire will be our first big test of our market and our product, and we’re frantically trying to get everything—the display, the brochures, the signs, etc.—done before the 28th of the month!
3. I've spent the past couple of weeks gathering brochures and things about TB, HIV, breastfeeding, nutrition, diabetes, and other health issues in SiSwati so that I can better design billboards about health-related topics for my bus stop art project. Hopefully this week I'll get started on the actual painting, and I'll definitely post lots of pretty pictures of my work on my Blog. The only challenge will be getting a 20L (5 gallon) bucket of paint up a hill to the main road so I can actually use it! It will be a chore, but I'm definitely looking forward to the painting part. Plus it will be nice to feel like I've left behind something TANGIBLE!
4. This past week, I got African Tick Bite Fever. It sounds like a joke, but it's totally not. Basically, at some point (probably in my sleep...I blame Eliza) I got bit by a tick on my arm. 72 hours later, I started feeling like death. Fever, vomiting, dizziness, muscle aches, etc. It was terrible. Peace Corps came down and picked me up from Pasture Valley (that's where I was) and drove me up to Mbabane and gave me lots of antibiotics and pain killers and anti-nausea medication, so I spent the next 4 days half-conscious at a B&B where I had the best food in Swaziland for 3 meals a day. It would have been fantastic if I hadn't felt so much like death. But I'm fine now, aside from the antibiotic-induced nausea that I am still experiencing, and I know to be more careful about ticks. I'll post photos next week when I'm on a computer that allows me to compress files (otherwise they take HOURS to upload...).
That's all for today, methinks. I have a fun story for you all, but I'll post that on Thursday so check back then!
Until then, salani kahle!
Love from the Swaz.
Justine/Phindile
Another PCV, Darryn, came to visit a couple of weeks ago and we spent an afternoon painting the swingset my parents and I built in March (and ruining children's clothes). We distracted about 10 of them from preschool and painted their hands, then had them do handprints all over the posts and poles and planks. They learned colors while they were doing it, plus they got to get all messy with paint (despite our best efforts to keep it off their clothes!). Win, win.
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