Just another day in paradise

It is Sunday.  I get up around seven to fetch water at the well with two 20 liter buckets in my wheelbarrow.  The neighbor girls are already leaving as I arrive.  They sing in chorus as they smoothly glide back to their homesteads with buckets of water perched on their heads.  The well is lower than I’ve ever seen it, and I have to practically lay on all fours to collect my second bucket. 

The two youngest boys are in and out of my house all morning.  I put on a movie for them to watch on my laptop as I scrub my mountain of dirty clothes clean.  The older two boys stop by my room periodically. 

-“Sister, are you coming to the game?” 

-“Sister, what time are you coming to the game?”

  “I’ll come around 12:30.”

“Can you bring Sihle with you and lock up the main house when you come?”

“No problem.”

The walk to the soccer pitch is about a mile through maize fields and grass as high as my chest.  In some areas the grass is so thick that I navigate from memory alone.  It’s in the middle of the valley, and it feels like you can see for miles in all directions.  We run into a soccer team from a nearby village which is walking to the pitch as well.  Sihle chatters along behind me in a near constant stream of musical, incomprehensible SiSwati.  Suddenly, we hear the du-du-du of a helicopter.  Sure enough, a helicopter is flying all around the valley.  The soccer team, Sihle and I stop in our tracks and jump up and down, waving like maniacs.  After almost a year of not seeing any air traffic, it is a bizarre sight. 

I sit in my usual spot at the soccer pitch.  Someone dug out the ground in one area and made a natural bench that way.  It’s by a corner of the field, but is shielded by tall grass on all sides.  I feel pretty inconspicuous sitting there.

Some of the regulars sit with me on the bench.  One is an old Grandpa with no hair, two teeth, and a comically large mustache.  He always sits and holds his knobkerrie regally in front of him like a king, and when he’s very focused on the game, he’ll pound it on the ground occasionally to emphasize a point.  He watches every team and every game seemingly without a favorite.  He is most interested in chiding the players when they perform poorly.  “What are you doing?  Are you playing for the other team now? What’s wrong with your legs?  Were you passing to the ancestors?”

The young men around him always find his running commentary highly amusing.  “Oh, grandfather!”   They howl at his derision.  They know that grandfather doesn’t have favorites and that as soon as their teams are up, they will be the ones facing his ridicule.  Sure enough, when my host brothers’ team is up, he is merciless in his criticism. 

All play momentarily stops as the helicopter from before flies back into the valley. This time, however, a long rope dangles beneath it carrying a person.  The helicopter begins flying right towards the enormous power lines.  I gasp and stare in horror as the person suspended beneath the helicopter hits the enormous power lines about 500 meters from the soccer pitch.  The rope detaches, and I can just barely make out a body hanging from the wires.  The helicopter swings away to the other side of the valley. 

“What happened?!”  I ask the man sitting next to me.

“Ahh, he is fixing the power line,” he tells me calmly. 

“What?!  It’s not an accident?”  I have to fight every impulse in my being to not run over to what is surely a horrific, toasted mess of a person dangling from the power line.

“No, he is fixing it.  The helicopter will come back for him soon.  It’s a South African company and they are fixing the wires of the electricity which go to Mozambique.”

Everyone quickly resumes observing the soccer match, so I fight the urge to go check on the adrenaline junky victim/electricity repair man.  Sure enough, about 20 minutes later, the helicopter swings back into view and hovers above the man with a rope.  The man on the wire re-attaches himself and the helicopter goes higher.  I can see the man splayed out on the rope as the helicopter gets further and further away.

“Best job ever,” I declare.  I wonder what kind of trade school teaches one to jump out of helicopters and onto potentially live wires.

The man next to me nods thoughtfully.

“But surely there’s a more cost effective way to fix the wires?”  The man next to me just raises his eyebrows and shakes his head at this.  Helicopter jumping it is, then.         

Men and boys I work with on various projects walk by and greet me throughout the games.  A few stop and chat for longer to catch up.  I’m practically bursting with pride to see many of my students behave like adults amidst such a heady testosterone-laden environment.  Then a man I don’t know approaches me, as is the norm at these events.  I hold my breath, waiting for my third marriage proposal of the day to come.  No, he wants sponsors for the soccer league.  I don’t do sponsors, I tell him, but I can give his team HIV lessons if he wants.  He does, and we exchange phone numbers.  His team will be the 6^th in the league that I will conduct lessons with. 

A while later, one of the boys on my host brothers’ team is injured.  I’ve seen these boys walk away with injuries that would bring most grown men to tears, so it’s clearly serious when Mfanafuthi stays laying down for 5 minutes before being assisted off the field.  There’s a lot of heckling, and the poor boy lashes out between sobs.  We apply ice and have him rest.  He’s covered in the red mud of the soccer field and bleeding from various minor injuries, but what really hurts him is his knee.  We let him rest for a few minutes, but he lays on the ground trying not to cry but silently screaming in pain.

Several of the more senior men on the league approach me as I comfort him. Many worried eyes are upon us. 

“Zanele,” Siboniso says quietly.  “You need to arrange transport to take him to the hospital.”

I nod my head, glad someone else made the call that the boy needs professional medical attention.  I try calling the clinic nurse, but her phone is off and I doubt she would come to help anyway.  I know that she often spends her own money to drive critical patients to the hospital, but I doubt a knee injury will qualify. 

I quickly call the volunteer who lives across the street from the hospital and ask for lodging for Mfanafuthi and I for the night.  It’s late on a Sunday, and there’s a good chance there won’t even be a doctor or a nurse in the emergency department by the time we arrive.  At least we can make him comfortable at her house for the night.  She agrees immediately.  That settled, I turn to the men standing around me.  

“The only problem is that all of my money is in my house,” I say.  “Can we get one of the little kids to run back and get it?”  None of the solemn men standing around me moves to make this happen, which is a very Swazi way of disagreeing with what someone says.  My mind quickly catches up to their thought process- it’s too far to go to risk missing what might be the only transport out of the community.

“How much do you need, make?” My friend the storeowner asks.

I shrug my shoulders, not knowing how much the hospital in Mankayane will cost us.  He asks again, and I shrug again.  He hands me a fresh two-hundred bill from his pocket, which is no small amount to him and those around us.  “Thank you so much.  I’ll pay you back tomorrow, I promise.  I have the money; it’s just in my house.”

“Don’t worry, make,” he says.         

I hand my keys off to one of my young host brothers with instructions for him to feed my dog while I’m away. 

Several boys take turns carrying Mfanafuthi to the road, and we wait 10 minutes before spotting a car on the horizon.  We jump up and down and gesture at Mfanafuthi laying there.  We hold our hands out like we are begging and indicate one finger to show that it would be enough if they only took him. 

Four trucks pass which are packed to their brims.  The drivers all punch their fist into the palm of their opposite hand, a signal meaning “it’s full.”

Finally, a car comes to a stop and the boys speak in low voices to negotiate a ride.  The man isn’t going nearly as far as the hospital, but if I can contribute gas money, he’ll take us.  “Of course,” I agree. 

“How much?” He eyes me up and down and I deflate.  My whiteness is going to make this one very expensive ride.  It is, but what’s important is that we make it to the emergency room before everyone goes home for the night.  The nurse who treats Mfanafuthi is nice, translating everything into English for my benefit and assuring me that I did the right thing in coming to the hospital.  It’s not a fracture, just some kind of soft tissue injury, he says.  He gives Mfanafuthi a painkiller shot in the rump and a bandage, but tells us to come back in the morning when the pharmacy opens to pay and pick up a subscription. 

We hobble across the street and bunker down at the generous volunteer’s place for the night.  Mfanafuthi is hesitant to try the American food we give him.  It is corn muffins, chicken noodle soup, cheese and crackers, and grapes for dinner.  Dessert is cake and ice cream.  His reaction to the food is pretty typical of Swazis I’ve fed American food to.  Hesitant, scared, disdainful (although I suppose I’m not much better when being fed tripe or parts of the animal I didn’t even know were edible). The scene repeats itself the next morning for breakfast with waffles, banana bread, juice, and toast.  When the volunteer offers to fry him some eggs, he responds favorably.  I whisper in his ear that it’s very important in American culture to say thank you.  He picks up on it, and graciously thanks our host when she brings out the eggs.  I think it’s important in Swazi culture to say thank you as well, but I’ve lost track of the many demoralizing times I’ve been treated as the benevolent white benefactress and seen other volunteers treated that way as well.

We go back to the hospital around 8, where we wait in various lines for over an hour to pay and get the medicine.  The hospital has open-air triage (TB prevention) like all Doctors Without Borders clinics in Swaziland.  As we are leaving, a young girl calls Mfanafuthi to come help her carry her World Food Programme 40 kg sack of maize.  We run into another young man from the village just then, so the four of us each grab a corner and lug the bag to the corner. 

We walk a kilometer or so to the bus rank, and I have a nice chat with Mfanafuthi on the way.  We talk about condom use, teen pregnancy, and women’s rights. 

“The problem is, Zanele, Swazi culture says a woman is below the man.”

“I don’t think that’s right.  A culture changes over time.  Think about how much Swazi culture has changed since your parents were born.”  He agrees and we talk about how responsible men try and provide for their children.    

 We arrive at the rank, and our kumbi isn’t there.  I run into a few of the conductors that I’m friendly with, and we chat for a while before I sit down to read my book while I wait.  Mfanafuthi sees some of his friends and goes to chat with them.  A young man with a hoody pulled low over his face approaches the bench and politely asks the woman sitting next to me which kumbi goes to M-.

She shrugs, so I respond that I’m waiting for it, too, and that it sits just there.  

He thanks me and sits next to me.  We chat for a few minutes, and he strikes me as a very nice young man.  Such a refreshing change of pace from the usual outlandish behavior at the bus rank.  When the kumbi finally pulls up a good thirty minutes later, it fills quickly, and the nice young man sitting next to me also sits next to me on the kumbi.  The ride is quiet, hot, and bumpy.  Perhaps due to the heat, the young man finally lowers his hoody and I see his face for the first time.  His lips have oozing sores, his hair is orange from malnutrition, and there are tell-tale tumors bulging on his ears and neck.  I gulp and look away.  I’ve seen his face hundreds of times on hundreds of people.  Even the child sitting on its mother’s lap two rows up seems to have that face as well.  The child’s eyes are yellow instead of white, and its skin looks like paper molded across the throbbing veins in its forehead.  The young man gets out of the kumbi at the same stop as me, and I want to take him aside and ask him if he’s seeking treatment or been tested.  But alas, there are many others getting off at the same stop, and I cannot broach the subject in privacy quickly enough.  He wants to know if we can walk together, as he is going across the river.  “No, I’m just going this way.  Have a nice visit with your mom, though!”  I tell him as our paths diverge.  It doesn’t occur to me until much later that I should have just walked with him until we could speak privately.                         

Later that day at the clinic, I am sitting around having a lively chat with the receptionist, TB counselor, and Expert Client.  A patient comes up and asks me for sponsors.  My coworkers immediately leap to my defense before I can respond; saying the line I told them once and they’ve passionately repeated dozens of times to would-be beneficiaries since.  “Not everyone in America is rich!  Wouldn’t you rather work for your money?  If you had asked her for work, she would have given it to you!  But no, you want a hand-out.  What does that teach you other than that you get something for nothing?” 

The woman is angry, as would-be beneficiaries usually are.  These people I view as extremely different from friends or community members asking for small loans or favors, which I am usually probably too generous with.  Rather, would-be beneficiaries are people who have never met me and don’t care even to give a polite greeting or learn my name before demanding money.  They act egregiously insulted if you refuse, and you can see in their eyes that nothing you say or do is going to change their minds that you are wealthy, you are greedy, and you are going against the natural order of the universe by not being more forthright with your stacks of gold.  My coworkers have seen this happen to me enough that they angrily shout at the offending party by now, god bless them.  I have made it clear to each of my coworkers that they are welcome to come to me for anything, and they have taken me up on the offer occasionally.

The woman is deflected, and she begins ranting about World Vision coming and taking pictures of her child, but her not getting any benefit from it.  In her unique way, she is telling us that she feels exploited.  Later in the conversation, we discover that she’s gotten food from World Vision before.  She doesn’t even like TOMS Shoes, which is the “charity” requiring the absolute least amount of reciprocal effort I know.  Yet minutes ago, she was demanding a handout from me.  I find the woman to be a fascinating contradiction and also refreshing, despite our rude first encounter.   

All day, I receive calls and visits from worried villagers inquiring about the boy I took to the hospital.  It is touching to see their concern, and I am pleased to be able to tell them that he’s doing very well. 

In the evening, I try reading children’s books to Sihle.  Getting a child who’s never been read to to pay attention is difficult, but I try to take a cue from my own father and use lively animations.  While my parents visited last week, Sihle became quite attached to my father.  It was touching to watch him cuddle up to my dad and stare up at him in wonder when my dad showed him such loving care.  Tonight, Sihle tires of my narration quite quickly, but I vow to try again tomorrow night.