The Storm

The Peace Corps sends us a text message warning about a hail storm early on a beautiful Thursday morning. “It’s going to storm,” I tell my host mom when I arrive home from work.

By 5 the winds are howling and everyone scampers to their respective houses. I sit in bed watching a movie on my laptop while Scruff T shakes next to me. There is uncharacteristically little lightening, but I am still worried about getting struck. Swaziland has the highest rate of lightning strikes in the entire world. I recently learned that I live in the vortex where all of this happens. It has something to do with the geology, apparently. It makes sense, too. Just last year, a boy on my soccer team was struck and killed. A few years before that, lightning struck a church here and 9 people died simultaneously. The rains are good for the farmers, but they often cause lots of damage.

By six, my windows are rattling and it looks like a tornado outside. I can still hear a tractor plowing a nearby field. “They must have a death wish,” I think. Tractors are few and far between, and renting a time slot of even an hour is done months in advance. If the tractor owner fell behind by even one customer, hundreds of farmers would be affected. They typically work 16 hour days during planting season. I pray that they stay safe.

At 7, I hear a loud crack, and the next thing I know, there was a gaping hole in my roof and dirt and grass are whirling around my room, coating everything in seconds. Dirt blows into my face, temporarily blinding me. The wind is stronger than the rain, but fearing that it was a lightning strike that might catch my thatch roof on fire, I quickly pack all of my valuables into my backpack and grab my dog. I am going to seek shelter in the main house.

Stepping outside is like stepping into a tornado. I can literally barely stand. It doesn’t help that I have my dog in my arms. She is afraid and disoriented in storms, so the best thing to do is to make sure that she stays with me and doesn’t run off. I try to lock my door for about 5 seconds before giving up, as the wind keeps pushing my hand away from the lock. I’m not worried that anyone would steal in this weather, but that the door would whip open from the wind. I give up and just run with Scruff-T to the main house. I trip on some wires that had fallen down, but finally make it to the main house. I pound on the main door, screaming to be heard over the wind. The curtain is pulled back, and they gesture for me to come in the side entrance. When I get inside, a neighbor boy, my host mom, and the two orphans are sitting in somber silence. The two little boys are sitting quietly on the couch, their eyes wide with fear and unshed tears.

I plop down next to Phumlane and say, “Bhuti, I need a hug.” He launches into my arms and we hold each other tightly for a moment, until I realize that my heart is pounding loudly, and I don’t want him to notice my fear.

“Yah,” make says. “The roof is gone.”

“Gone?”

“Yes, gone, over the kitchen and the room of Xolani.”

“Ncesi, my roof is also gone.” It makes sense, then, why they gestured for me to enter in the side door. The front door goes into the kitchen, and that roof was gone.

We sit there quietly for a few more moments. The storm rages on outside. We quickly go to Xolani’s room and cover the furniture with canvas tarps and hold those down with the concrete blocks which had fallen into the room. (Ok, confession, I was still terrified of the storm, so I stood holding the flashlight for the others from the doorway, with one foot inside the room that still had a roof). It settles down quickly enough, though. Once the wind dies down, Phumlane and the neighbor boy are sent with my flashlight to try and find the roof and to assess the damage to my house.

They come back a worrying ten minutes later to report. Apparently, the roof flew off and hit my roof (thus causing the gaping hole in my roof). Then the roof flew over to the latrine, hit the latrine, and finally landed scattered in pieces about 200 meters away in the fields.

When the storm dies down a bit more, I run with the two older boys back to my house to grab what we can. The damage is much less than I thought it was, and the hole is only about 2 feet in diameter. We grab my blankets and I quickly also grab Ellie, my trusty stuffed elephant. Upon returning to the main house, I toss Ellie to the youngest boy, Sihle, who wi still sitting mutely in his chair. He looks up and me and a slow smile brightens his face. There is the boy I know and love. He immediately starts playing with the elephant with more vigor than usual, as he badly needs the distraction.

We sit there quietly for a while, occasionally exclaiming. The storm is gone completely by about 8. Soon enough, the first neighbors start arriving. There are too few chairs, so Sihle climbs into my lap and immediately falls asleep.

The visits are brief and full of disbelief. Relatives and friends are called in the brief moments when we have network coverage. Everyone is alright, a few more roofs were blown off. I call the nearest volunteer and she is fine.

Make blames the storm on the giant magical snake which lives in the Ngwempisi river. I’ve heard many stories about this snake. I even once found an academic paper by an anthropologist who came out to study it in the 1980s. Last year when I got bilharzia from the river, make said it was the snake. Now it is the snake again. What an angry snake.

I sleep on a grass mat wrapped in my blankets on the floor. We are all up at 5. I quickly bathe and walk around the property with make, assessing the damage. Clothes and pieces of building are everywhere.

“I don’t know where to start,” she tells me. It is the first time in this whole ordeal that she has been anything other than sturdy as a rock. “I wanted to get married in December. Now I don’t know. I wanted to plow today.”

“Well, how about I start with sweeping?” She agrees and begins to make a fire outside while I separate the broken glass from the cement in the house. I bring out brick after brick and sweep mountains of sediment outside. When I’m done about two hours later, the floor is clean-walkable. So that way everyone can at least use the kitchen.

Neighbor after neighbor stops by and there is much exclaiming “Nkhosi yami!” (My lord!)

The boys chase chickens around the yard until they catch the two that are to be eaten this week. I let the goats out of their pen.

A man comes by and I help him unfold and patch up the tarp that will be put up in place of a roof until the roof can be fixed. He can see that I’m getting weak from hunger, so he sends me away to eat for a bit. All I have at home that doesn’t require cooking is an orange and 3 crackers. I wolf those down and go back outside much refreshed.

I then excuse myself and head to the clinic for a nursery group meeting. I run into some neighbor women on the way. “Zanele, you are getting--” And the lady puffs out her cheeks.

“Yah, yah,” I smile and keep walking. She's the third person to tell me that this week. Sure, I've put on maybe 5 pounds lately from stress-eating, but wow is it amazing how your waistline is watched!

The clinic is already packed with people, all inquiring after one another and sharing their damage reports. An empty water tank blew over the clinic fence and landed about a mile downriver. The chairman of the support group had his house literally crumble around him-walls and ceiling. It seems as though everyone has lost a roof or something.

After catching up, I finally go check on the nursery with a few of the members. The entire left wall is collapsed. Luckily, it didn’t break our irrigation system, but it is a major setback we can’t afford at the moment (especially considering that not a single seed supplier in the country has any pepper in stock right now, and that’s our biggest seller during this season). We prop it up as best we can. Some of the members go to chase down the runaway water tank, and one member (the lazieeeest of them all) stays with me to plant 2,200 beetroots.

I work like a madman, and sure enough, she just stands there without moving until it’s time to start putting the seeds in their holes (the easiest job). About an hour in, I force her to switch roles because my back is killing me.

The nursery secretary walks in and asks me who we’re planting for. I tell him that I’m just planting what he told me to plant. No, he wanted 4,000 tomatoes, not 4,000 beetroots. I grit my teeth at the setback. We finish soon enough, though, and after a short nursery meeting to discuss damage control , I’m headed home.

I arrive home as make is leaving. My roof is mostly fixed and the tarp is in place. She’s going to inquire about an extra tractor. She hands me the money and tells me to pay the tractor drivers when they finish. When they go, I take a bucket and start collecting the sweet potatoes lost from last year’s harvest that the tractors ground up. I get about a 20 liter bucket and wash them. I think its progress, because a year ago, I know I wouldn’t have been trusted with a lot of these responsibilities.

Sihle arrives home from school and immediately starts helping me wash potatoes after he’s done eating. I tell him to rest, but he wants to help. What a good boy. It’s only 3:30 in the afternoon as I write this, but I’m exhausted from a day of physical labor. Can’t wait to eat my sweet potato for dinner, though.