With only a few days until swearing-in, I decided it was
time for another update. Even if I
haven’t had enough internet access to respond to each of your words of
wisdom/letters/comments/emails individually, know that they are cherished and
that I look forward to them immensely. I
can’t believe how awesome my friends and family are!
Some pics:
So what have I been up to?
Classes and life continue as normal, and I still feel incredibly blessed
to have such a great host family. One of
my trainers even remarked; “That Gogo of yours- she’s one in a million, I tell
you! One in a million!” (Just in case you needed more proof- as I was
typing this, Gogo came by with two lemons and advised me to make a lemon tea
for my scratchy cold voice!) It will be
so hard to leave this family, but there is so much to look forward to with the
next one. Speaking of…
On the job training is a little trip we took mid-training to
our permanent sites with our work counterparts.
My work counterpart is a young “expert client” (HIV counselor) at the
local clinic, where I will be doing most of my work. She is sassy and awesome. As one of our trainers rather coarsely
explained that Swazi women think constant proposals and comments from men are
flattering, my counterpart voiced her disagreement LOUDLY! My kind of girl, to be sure. She has a vision for my work, and has already
planned some income generating projects I can help facilitate. (Quick- where’s that Peace Corps manual on
how to build a chicken coop?!) She also
wants to start a support group for HIV+ children, and I definitely think my
experience working with kids will fit in nicely here. Sitting around wasting taxpayer money? Unlikely.
My permanent site is 10 kilometers down a dirt road, and the
surroundings are quite stark. At first,
I am taken by surprise at the rural-ness of it as compared to our training
site. There are at least 100 meters
between the closest homesteads, and homesteads appear to dot the valley in a
haphazard way. I ask five different
people the boundaries of village M-, and get five different responses and some
vague hand-waving towards distant houses that evidently do not belong to
village M-. After a grueling 3 hours
chopping firewood by the river with my host mom, I begin to romanticize the
desolate beauty of the village. If you
squint a little, M- might be some rural area in Wyoming. It is truly majestic, and I can’t wait to see
it in the wet season when the whole valley turns green.
My host family is pretty nuclear (which is pretty surprising
in Swaziland). Babe works in the mines
in South Africa, but is home for the weekend when I’m there. I pull out all the stops with my SiSwati, as
he speaks no English, and he warms up to me quickly. Make is a hard-working traditional Swazi
woman with many sons, three of whom live on the homestead and range in age from
17 to 28/29). Make has also taken in a
shy OVC (orphans and vulnerable children) who is somehow related, and plans on
taking in another one at some point next year.
“It is difficult,” she tells me sadly during a lull in our Sunday
afternoon card game. There is not a
single family here that remains untouched by the devastation of AIDS.
Anyone interested in reading a really great book on AIDS in
Africa, please read “28 Stories of AIDS in Africa.” The introduction does an amazing job at
explaining the epidemic in an incredibly poignant way, and emphasizes that no
two countries share the same narrative.
For this reason, the author tells 28 personal stories from 28 different
countries (1 story for every million Africans who have died from AIDS). The first chapter is the Swazi story. Reading this book and living in the country
with the world’s highest infection rate has taught me that one of the greatest
systemic evils in our world is the patenting of life-saving ARVs. But I digress…
