I love you like chicken dust!

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:

(These are pictures of the mountain I lived on).

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…