On Poverty Porn

Had I seen the documentary “Born into Brothels” a few years ago, I probably would have liked it.  The chaotic scenes of Calcutta’s red light district, the snippets of Hindi I can halfway understand, and the starkly hopeless portrayal of the film’s childlike subjects make for a very compelling film. 

But these days…it looks like poverty porn.  I have no doubt that the filmmakers made the documentary with the best of intentions and that the white woman who helped the children had nothing but love and good intentions for the kids.  And while it’s necessary to be exposed to the harsh realities of life in other parts of the world, it’s so much easier to zoom in your Nokia lens on the eyes of a child whose skin color is different and who doesn’t live in your own backyard.

Let’s turn the camera around for a moment to really examine the crassness of such an action.  Let’s say a young African backpacker rode up into your town one day and started taking pictures and filming your children.  You know that when he goes home, he will speak of our quaintness, our backwards ways, and our strange jobs.  He will post pictures of our children online without our permission and he will take pictures of us doing our jobs to post on a cheeky Instagram entitled “These are real jobs in America.”  He will not learn our names, and he will promise to send us the pictures.  Maybe he will even promise to pay our children’s school fees.  But he won’t. 

I used to bring backpackers into my community.  I would get frustrated when, on my weekly night in town, they would sit around the bar of the hostel and talk about how developed and rich people are here.  (Swaziland, like many countries, hides its poverty well off the main tourist route).  So I would offer to show them “the real” Swaziland….Or at least the Swaziland that 70% of the people live in.  It is a Swaziland with dirty naked babies, strangely colorful religious rituals, and lots of opportunities for that perfect “African” Instagram photo to share with your friends back home. 

So I would take them to my community, and they would have a very moving experience as people welcomed them with open arms.  They would take lots of photos and promise to email them to me so that I could print them for my friends who had welcomed them so kindly.  And despite my follow-up requests…not a single backpacker has ever emailed me the photos. 

Like the film “Born into Brothels,” the experiences of backpackers are less about the people whose lives they are documenting and more about their experiences as amateur photographers on the road in wild and savage lands.  My least favorite had to have been the French-Canadian photographer who refused to cover up his tattoo when I asked him.  His goal was to go to every country in the world.  Swaziland was 140-something and he threw a tantrum when I told him he wouldn’t be able to exchange his money at the bank on a Sunday. 

I sometimes feel that I may be guilty of perpetuating the “poor African” stereotype, if only to a lesser extent.  But then I remind myself that I would never point a camera at my host brother and make a world-famous documentary about him.  Because the documentary wouldn’t really be about him, but what he represents as just another AIDS orphan in Africa.  Because that’s how it would come across.  A movie wouldn’t show how he does in school, his favorite movie, his favorite thing to draw, and that he loves to play ball.  A movie would only show him as that poor African child who has a white woman interested in saving him.  I shudder to think that any artist with a video camera come here and record the lives of the people I love as if they were noble savages or something.  But it happens every day.  And is this blog not also a kind of testament to “my adventures in Swaziland”? (Mission trips are the worst in terms of the noble savage imagery, but at least their hearts are less selfish than those of backpackers). 

So here’s my etiquette list for backpackers, artistic types, missionaries, and anyone else traveling to any neck of the woods anywhere, ever:

1.       Don’t talk about a country you’ve been in for two seconds (or less than 6 months) negatively.

2.       Let locals help, but don’t expect their kindness to be free.  Tip any man or woman who helps you a few bucks.  If they refuse, great.  If not, know that they probably needed it a lot more than you.

3.       10% gratuity is polite in restaurants in southern Africa.  Don’t take advantage.  Tips are usually shared collectively and supplement a meager income.

4.       Lifts are also not free unless they refuse your cash.

5.       Don’t complain about your hectic time trying to arrange local transport.  This is called daily life, and your privilege reeks when you do it.

6.       Don’t say “I’m glad I paid a bribe.  I just wanted to have the experience.”  (A backpacker actually said this to me recently).  Bribes are embarrassing for your hosts.

7.       Don’t over-barter unless you know you’re getting ripped off.  You clearly have enough money to travel abroad and are undervaluing craftsmen’s work when you force them to earn mere pennies off of a sale. 

8.       Do NOT take pictures without the permission of the subjects.  (This one annoys me SO MUCH!) Furthermore, tell them how you will use those photos. 

9.       Don’t make promises you can’t keep. “Yes, I will sponsor a child,” is easy in the heat of the moment and the warmth of their smiles.  It’s a lot harder to commit to on the other side.

10.   Learn the names of the maids at the hostels you stay at, not just the names of the white bartenders.

Sorry for the rant…I guess I’m just frustrated from my interactions with travelers who don’t really even care about this place other than to check off another country on their list before moving on to their next Instagram moment.

Any Given Saturday

“When I talk to people at home about the pandemic, I get the sense that they feel a dying African is somehow different from a dying Canadian, American or German- that Africans have lower expectations or place less value on their lives.  That to be an orphaned fifteen-year-old thrust into caring for four bewildered siblings, or a teacher thrown out of her house after she tells her husband she is infected- that somehow this would be less terrifying or strange for a person in Zambia or Mozambique than it would be for someone in the United States or Britain.”

---Stephanie Nolen, 28 Stories of AIDS in Africa

It’s been a long time since I went to a funeral. 

A neighbor and relative of my host family died of TB.  No one says AIDS.  He leaves behind many sweet children who are now double orphans.  Two of his daughters are my artists- they come almost every day after school to carefully color in the lines in my coloring books. 

I wake up on Saturday around 5:30.  I bucket bathe and make an omelet for breakfast.  My host mom knocks on my door around 7:30.  “Zanele, I am going to cut some maize, and then I am going.” 

“Ok, I’ll be ready in 5 minutes,” I tell her.  I have a 10kg bag of rice we’re taking to the family.  I bought it months ago and no one but a mouse has nibbled on it since then.  I want to help the family, who I know to be extremely poor.     

Women are already well into the throws of cooking when we arrive.  The men are throwing tarps over the houses to create a space for the night vigil.  A girl who lives on the homestead walks around with a face mask hanging around her neck.  I am worried that the homestead has more than one case of active TB.

I follow my host mom around like a puppy and my puppy follows me.  At one point, my host mom goes home with an old lady, so I follow.  She points out an herb that lowers blood pressure, so we help the old lady collect some.  Then we tear off the leaves to put in a pot to boil.   

We go back to the homestead of the funeral, which is only a 5 minute walk away.  One of my artists proudly shows me how she can draw perfectly symmetrical circles on the sand.  All of his kids look like they’re doing fine.  They are tired and kept busy, but they seem fine. 

Then my host mom takes me to a rondhovel that’s a bit separated from the homestead.  The smell of fermenting maize washes over me as I duck through the low doorway.  In a giant water barrel, the fermenting maize is making a bubbling and popping sound.  It is uncombodze, the traditional Swazi alcoholic beverage of choice.  It takes 3 days to ferment and a white Swazi once told me that sometimes an old battery is dropped into the mix to speed the process.  If a whole barrel seems like a lot for a funeral, keep in mind that the drink has a really low alcohol percentage- usually between 1 and 3%.  I’ve tried it before, and know that I’d need to drink at least a gallon before I would even start to taste the alcohol in it. 

We spend the next hour or so straining the solid bits of maize out of the brew by dumping it in buckets over mesh bags.  It smells pretty good and our hands and fronts become soaked and sticky with the chunky pieces of maize.  When we are finished, the brew begins frothing and overflowing out of the smaller water barrels we’d transferred it to.        

After that, the day is a blur of washing dishes and chopping liselwa- a Swazi indigenous squash that is rather tasteless.  I am offered food repeatedly, which I keep refusing as politely as possible even as I become hungrier and hungrier.  I know that I am snubbing their food, but I also know that I will be violently ill if I eat it, especially eating with my hands and with no clean water or soap to wash with.

The body arrives around 4.  There is some hushed panic on the homestead, as they don’t have the requisite number of pallbearers.  Any man standing around quickly runs to the coffin to help.  Only 5 adult men can be found, so one old woman is the 6^th pallbearer as they carry the blanket covered coffin from the truck to the tent.  The neighbor women follow the coffin singing a subdued hymn in low tones. 

Suddenly, the women who had been laughing and working alongside me all day break down.  Other women are quick to soothe them.  But the worst is the children.  The sweet, sweet girls who are my artists break into wails calling for their papa.  They are quickly taken inside and held by their female relatives, but their wailing continues over the hymns. 

I stand outside staring at my toes.  I try and concentrate on anything but the noise of their grief.  I am standing with the girls’ school friends.  They, too, are uncharacteristically quiet.  We are all staring at various spots on the ground, trying to build walls around our ears with our minds.

I leave then to feed Scruff-T and I don’t go back.  This is a small funeral.  There will be no distracting myself or distancing myself from the bereaved around me.  So I decide to get some sleep and wake up very early the next morning to go to the end of the funeral.    

I wake at 5 in the morning and throw a scarf over my hair.  I leave with a flashlight, but the sun is already rising by the time I get to the road.  As I get to the road, I see the funeral procession coming towards me, so I turn and begin walking with a friend of mine.

He asks about funeral customs in America and my relationship to the deceased.  He is heartily amused by my explanation of an Irish-American wake and also intrigued when I explain that funerals are attended by only those close to the deceased and bereaved.  As we walk, the number of mourners behind us swells to about 200.  All of the closest neighbors have come to the burial.  With over 200 mourners, it is the smallest Swazi funeral I’ve ever attended. 

We walk the kilometer or so to the unofficial graveyard of the community.  The only way you can tell it is a graveyard is the humps of earth and the occasional arrangement of stones over some of the humps.  An old man asks me for my dog in exchange for a cow.

“No, I will give you my dog for 20 cows.  You must pay lobola.”

All of the men around me crack up.  “Zanele- this is not a wife!” One laughs, pointing at Scruff-T. 

“Ahh, but she is my baby, so he must pay lobola.” 

By now we have arrived at the grave and we spend the next 20 minutes singing songs as the body is lowered into the ground.  I realize that everyone has divided at the gravesite by gender and that I am on the male side.  I slide discreetly towards the back of the crowd and join the women.  My host family grieves close to the grave with the family. 

I begin to slowly become distressed as I realize that I forgot to bring small coins for the collection.  Around this point in the funeral, a collection is taken up to help pay for funeral expenses.  As the only white person in attendance, I feel scrutinized and judged already.  Luckily, one of the women walking back summons me to go with her to help dish up the take-away containers.  The portion sizes are small, but there is somehow enough for everyone.  I quickly scarf down a meager portion of rice and gristle between washing dishes.  Later, a woman offers me a large plate piled high with side dishes, a sign of respect for my status and close familial relationship to the deceased.  I am touched, but tell her I have already eaten.    

When I get home after dishing and washing dishes, I get a whatsapp (like texting but cheaper) from one of our GLOW counselors informing me that one of our own GLOW counselors has also passed and was also buried last night.  She leaves behind a 4,6, and 8 year old.  As I sit on my phone sending out messages to the GLOW community informing them of her passing, my little bhuti comes in and wants to watch his favorite movie.  He rests his head in my lap as I nod off to sleep.  Funerals for me will forever be associated with the sensations of sleeplessness.

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.

Pictures of CAMP GLOW

Here are some pictures of last year's Camp GLOW.  Please see the previous entry for information on how YOU can help these wonderful girls.

Here a local artist was teaching the girls how to paint portraits of each other.

Hanging out on the playground during a break. 

We're all excited for the talent show. 

Teamwork

No such thing as tired!

Their portraits

Getting to know each other

Hillarious take on the traditional South African "gumboot dance."

All together now

Busy schedule for Health Day

 New friends

Some dances were modern...

Others were traditional.  Check out that flexibility!!!

Why we need more programs like GLOW and how YOU can help!

Why GLOW Matters

How many times have I seen this scenario play out in the bus rank?

A man in his 20s or 30s approaches a schoolgirl.  He starts out by grabbing her wrist, pinching her rear, or otherwise invading her space.  The schoolgirl always reacts the same way; she instantly startles and raises a fist in defense.  The man is already speaking by this point, soothing her with his voice that he is a friend.  She relaxes a bit and tries once more to be free of him.  If she starts walking, he walks with her with a tight hold on her fist.  If she is standing, he stays standing close to her.  He starts off with a joke and she lets down her guard.  Then he is speaking in low, bedroom tones.  He loves her, he wants her number…she is the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen.  If he’s very bold- he wants to marry her and make her pregnant with his babies.  He talks steadily at her, never bothering to ask how old she is or to learn her name.  She softens.  Who wouldn’t be thrilled to be the recipient of such crooning and attention?  After about 5 minutes of wearing down her defenses, he claims victory when she gives up her phone number. 

Will the girl make healthy choices with this man who claims to love her before knowing her?  Will he be faithful?  Will she insist on using a condom? 

If a girl felt loved and confident in whom she was, would she succumb to that charming, much older kumbi conductor pressing his fingers into her wrist in the bus rank?  If she was comfortable in her body, would she speak up about her bodily needs? 

That is why the GLOW (Girls Leading Our World) program is so important.  It takes girls who may feel unloved and undervalued and teaches them that they can do anything that they want to.  They are told that they are valuable, taught that they have the right to bodily autonomy and encouraged to have aspirations besides motherhood. 

I know so many girls and women who desperately needed something like GLOW;

-My friend contracted HIV when she was 14 years old from her much older boyfriend.  She told me that if she had felt loved at home, if she knew that she had the right to say no, she would not have consented.    

-Another friend of mine has 7 children, most of whom she didn’t want.  She can’t take birth control pills because her blood pressure is too high.  Her boyfriend won’t wear a condom.  When I train the men's soccer teams on reproductive health, they typically also bawk at the idea of wearing condoms.  When I ask them if they would if their partner insisted, they always say they would.  Perhaps it's just a matter of teaching the girls that they have the right to insist and that they must be vocal about their needs. 

-Just last week, a 16 year old girl at my host brother’s high school committed suicide when she found out she was pregnant and the father denied paternity. 

-A teenage girl I know took a martial arts class after school and loved it.  She stopped going when the teacher kissed her.  In other instances, I have seen male teachers discreetly hand money to attractive female schoolgirls.  I asked some Swazi friends what this could mean, and they all indicated that my terrible suspicion is probably accurate. 

-My young SiSwati tutor is telling me about her “teka” ceremony.  In Swazi culture, it is called “juma” when a woman spends the night at the homestead of her boyfriend.  If the boyfriend’s family wants her to marry him, they might perform the bride-snatching ceremony called “teka”, during which the girl is dragged early in the morning from bed, stripped naked, and made to sit in the cattle kraal until she cries.  There is no such thing as divorce if one marries under Swazi customary law, so the bride has little recourse.  I ask my tutor if she wanted to marry her husband.  She is silent for a moment, then says “I was brilliant in school.  I was always position one or position two.  I was too young.  I had no choice.”  I ask her then if her in-laws are kind to her, as the Swazi wife must obediently live on her husband’s family’s homestead once married.  She is again too silent for such a talkative lady.  Then slowly, “I am used to it now.”  Apparently (in my chiefdoms at least), the bride-snatching ritual changed in 2012.  Now, the girls are first taken to the Umphakatsi, where they must tell the chief or headman if they want to marry the man.  If they say that they don’t want to marry him, then the man is not allowed to perform the teka ceremony on her.  It is fantastic progress, but sadly too late for my friend who was tekad in 2011. 

……. I wish that my SiSwati teacher were the only woman I knew who was tekad against her will.  I wish that the teen pregnancy rate at my rural high school didn't cause 1/3 of all girls to drop out before graduating.  I wish that strong female friendships were encouraged the same way strong male friendships are here. 

Programs like GLOW are badly needed.  At Camp GLOW, girls get a chance to learn to take pride in themselves, their minds, and their bodies. 

The program includes;

-Comprehensive health education (delaying sexual debut, abstinence, male and female condom use, birth control, STIs, HIV, healthy relationships, managing menstruation, individual nurse consultations, male and female role models panel)

 -Career guidance (interviewing, resume writing, how to apply to university, job fair, goal-setting)

-Artistic expression (painting, screen printing, spoken word, singing, talent show, dancing)

-Leadership back home (community service project design, teamwork, founding a club, educating peers)

In the evenings, girls can choose between; self-defense, knitting, homemade sanitary pads, financial literacy, sports, and much more!       

It’s amazing how rapidly the girls bond.  It’s also amazing to see how quickly their self-esteem rises. 

There is no quantifying what impact this program has.  If even one girl decides to wait to have sex, or feels strong enough to ask her partner to wear a condom, then it was all worth it.  Maybe one of these girls will someday become the first female prime minister of Swaziland.  The important part, however, is that every girl there believes that she has the potential to be prime minister someday. 

CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO CAMP GLOW

 We need to raise $9,000 by December.  Because Swazis also recognize how important it is to give these girls the tools they need to succeed, all of the counselors and guest speakers are helping at camp pro-bono.  Your donation will be spent on a counselor training seminar, transporting the 75 girls to the campsite, feeding them, and paying for their lodging.  Because the US dollar goes a long way here, no amount is too small.  Thank you in advance for your generous support. 

Community Day

I don’t put many pictures in here, so I thought this month I’d add a few of a recent community event.  A friend took these photos, and I just love how everyone is having a great time in them.  I especially like that this entire event (although sponsored by American-financed organizations) was put on by Swazis.  As far as I know, I was the only non-Swazi to play any part in it.

The day before the event, an NGO truck rolled into the clinic and unloaded about 50 live chickens and enough food to feed the estimated 1,000 guests.  Community members began arriving and we proceeded to spend the entire afternoon butchering them.  Soooo gross.  I established myself as a cheese girl who didn’t know the proper way to gut a chicken.  (Cheese boys and girls are like city-slickers who faint at the trials of rural life).  By the end of the day, I was a pro at killing and cleaning chickens.  All parts of the chicken were used; intestines, feet, and heads included. 

On the day of the event, I went to the clinic at 6 and helped load the truck to take to the Umphakatsi.  This is the community meeting place located in each chiefdom and known in English as the “royal kraal”.  Usually only married women have to cover their heads at Umphakatsi, but the nurse told both my unmarried friend and I to go to her house to grab some scarves before we left.  I cooked, chopped and washed dishes all day while the NGOs gave community talks.  Different dances and skits revolving around HIV were performed.  The entire community was there, and 71 people got tested for HIV.  Of those, only 8 tested positive.  It is perhaps an encouraging sign that only 8 people tested positive, as it is well below the national average.  The lives of those people and the lives of their families will be forever changed, but that’s 8 more people who are also now empowered to protect their sexual partners.       

These aren’t the kind of photos you’d see on Save the Children infomercials; because they’re not the kind of photos that make you want to crack open your checkbook with guilt.  They don’t focus on the poverty of the subjects, but rather on their happiness and togetherness- two characteristics of Swazis I deeply admire.

A lot of times, Peace Corps volunteers in Swaziland feel frustrated that their work isn’t sustainable or isn’t helping anyone out in the long run.  We worry that we’ll come back to our communities in a decade and nothing will have changed.  We hold long, heated discussions about whether or not we’re perpetuating a cycle of dependency.  Sometimes we even wonder if anyone will miss us for any other reason than that we were mobile ATMs while we were here.

 But on that day, I had no doubts about the resilience and capabilities of my community.  No one called me Umlungu or asked me for money.  We just worked side by side to give our community an amazing day.  When the event ended late in the afternoon, the whole village seemed to be working at breaking down the tents and cleaning up.  They did this all while laughing and singing loudly.    

 

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.